Abstract

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:Statius’ Thebaid and the Poetics of Civil WarMark MastersonCharles McNelis. Statius’ Thebaid and the Poetics of Civil War. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007. x + 203 pp. Cloth, $90.In this well-focused study, Charles McNelis gives what is due both to the poetics of Statius’ epic and to what John Henderson has called its “political intelligence” (PCPS 37 [1991]: 52). Regarding the poem as a product of its time both in terms of poetics and politics, McNelis shows that Statius uses the considerable arsenal of the Latin poets’ ability to be intertextual to create a work that addresses [End Page 436] the particular situation of post–civil wars Flavian Rome. McNelis finds that Statius proposes that the epic teleology of the Golden Age’s reestablishment under Augustus that Virgil presents (albeit with some ambiguity) “has been thwarted and/or challenged, thus suggesting the fragile nature of any claim—even claims that define a society—to have brought an end to civil war” (177). Instead, Statius suggests that while it is possible for a particular civil conflict to come to an end, the results of it are ever with us and, further, that resolution comes in the form of clementia which is available to all on an individual basis from an entity that takes no blood sacrifice and is aniconic (163; Theb. 12.487–88, 493–94). A multifaceted challenge to the Virgilian/Augustan narrative of communal imperium sine fine guaranteed by Jove is manifest here.In order to make the case that Augustan/Virgilian teleology does not fit Flavian Rome, Statius’ particular strategy is a resort to Callimachus whose criticism of the epic genre had already made frequent appearances in Latin poetry. McNelis sees Statius restaging over the course of the epic the conflict that Callimachus (in Aetia 1 and elsewhere) presents between finely worked poetry and overdone epic. This conflict then reflects the presence of civil war in the literary-generic contouring of the poem. The presence of this conflict also ensures, in McNelis’ estimation, that the Thebaid is most emphatically not the “one continuous song” (Aetia 1.1.3: ) that Callimachus presents as the undesirable goal of epic composition and instead “replicate[s]” civil war “in the very fibres of the poem” (1).After the introduction, McNelis presents in the first chapter (“Gods, Humans and the Literary Tradition”) a discussion of Thebaid 1 with special attention paid to the story of Coroebus and the particularly malevolent Apollo therein. McNelis underscores in this story (significantly an aetion) the essentially hostile nature of the gods in the poem and the blending of them with chthonic forces, exemplified by Apollo’s killing of Python and his revenge, via a baby-eating monster, for the death of a baby born to a young woman he had raped. This story promises—and it is a promise that the epic delivers—that humans can hardly expect a settled existence with Jove as beneficent ruler.The second chapter (“Beginning”) foregrounds discussion of the necklace made by Vulcan, the Cyclopes, and the Telchines for Harmonia. McNelis sees in the necklace a product from the god of the forge’s workshop that comments on this epic in as serious a manner as the shields of Achilles and Aeneas comment on their respective epics. It is here that McNelis makes a key connection to the Aetia, for it is the Telchines whom Callimachus takes to task at 1.1.1. While at times he overstates the power of the necklace to cause things to happen (e.g., 51), McNelis is right to emphasize its significance. The necklace promises communal dissolution from the hands of the gods just as surely as the shield of Aeneas promises reintegration, likewise overseen by divine forces. Too, it is fitting that the poet of the Silvae would focus on a luxurious item such as this.In the third chapter (“Nemea”), McNelis sees the Callimachean aspects of the plot derail the warlike plan of Vulcan and the Telchines in the famous [End Page 437] digression at Nemea. McNelis draws the reader’s attention to the fact that the great body of water that is epic has been reduced to but...