Deforestation, Metapoetics, and the Ethics of War in Statius’s Thebaid 6

summary:

Statius combines the epic tree-cutting topos with the urbs capta motif in Thebaid 6 to criticize the Argive expedition and comment on his poetic project. Water imagery, a common symbol of poetry, initiates the metapoetics of tree-cutting in Nemea, which acts as a metaphor both for Statius’s composition and his rivalry with his predecessors. Statius harvests the Nemean forest as the silva, the “raw material,” of his poetic inspiration to transition the poem back to epic after the delay in pastoral Nemea and to present Polynices and the Argives as violent conquerors.