Lactantius. Lactantii Placidi: In Statii Thebaida Commentum. Ed. Robert Dale Sweeney. Stuttgart: Teubner, 1997.
An edition of the commentary by Lactantius Placidus.
Laistner, M. L. W. Thought and Letters in Western Europe, A.D. 500 to 900. Ithaca: Cornell
University Press, 1957.
A good account of how the Roman literary heritage was preserved.
SELECTED ANNOTATED BIBLIOGRAPHY ≥∫≥
Lewis, C. S. “Dante’s Statius.” In Studies in Medieval and Renaissance Literature, pp. 94–102.
Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1966.
Lewis argues that the horrors of Statius are a “sincere reaction to the terrible period” in which he lived and that Dante would have read him as he would read a “medieval moral theologian.” Lewis also treats Statius in The Allegory of Love (Oxford, 1936), where he argues that the Thebaid reflects a shift in imaginative power from the ancient gods to personifications like Piety and Clemency. A third work, The Discarded Image(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1964), comments on the figure of Nature and the scholia of Lactantius that created the figure Demogorgone.
Lewis, Charlton T. A Latin Dictionary. Oxford: At the Clarendon Press, 1996.
This dictionary, which first appeared in 1879, is a revision of a work edited by E. A. Andrews and is based on the work of German philologists and Charles Short. It is commonly referred to as Lewis and Short. It contains extensive annotations on Statius’s Thebaid.
Mackay, I. A. “Statius in Purgatory.” Classica et Mediaevalia 26 (1965): 293–305.
Mackay mentions Statius’s trope of alternative explanations; for example, the possible reasons for earthquakes (Thebaid 7.809–17).
Martinez, Ronald. “Dante and the Two Canons: Statius in Virgil’s Footsteps (Purgatorio 21–
30).” Comparative Literature Studies 32 (1995): 151–75.
Martinez shows how Dante used Statius to conceive his own relation to Virgil. He notes the influence of Statius’s final lines (they were copied as a model formula for closure by Petrarch’s Africa, Joseph of Exeter, Walter of Chatillon, Alain de Lille’s Anticlaudianus, and Boccaccio’s Filocolo). Martinez also points out that the repetition of Parthenopaeus, the Arcadian, at the end of the Thebaid imitates the triple invocation of Orpheus for Eurydice at the end of Virgil’s Georgics.
Patterson, Lee. Chaucer and the Subject of History. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press,
1991.
Patterson argues that the classics gave Chaucer a form that allowed meaning and interpretability without allegorical exegesis; and “a prospect upon life that is capacious and synoptic but not dismissively transcendental—in other words, a historiography”
(p. 61). He contrasts the recursive violence that Chaucer associated with Thebes (as when the incest of Oedipus replays the fate of Cadmus’s earthborn soldiers) with the linear but limited plot of Christian causality, which obscures the role of chance and is finally grounded in human will. Patterson also argues that the “broche of Thebes” is a “sign of illicit sexuality,” made by Vulcan for Harmonia, daughter of Mars and Venus, when she marries Cadmus, causing their exile from the city and transformation to serpents. Next it belongs to Semele, struck by Jove’s lightning; then Agave, driven mad by the Furies; then Argia, who gives it to Euripyle if she will reveal the hiding place of her husband Amphiaraus, an act of betrayal that leads to his engulfment in the earth. The brooch rouses erotic emotions with deadly consequences, puts love and war at odds in mutual subversion, and operates as a metonym for “the primal polymorphousness of Theban emotions and the self-destructive regressiveness that results from submitting to a self unknown” (p. 76).
≥∫∂ SELECTED ANNOTATED BIBLIOGRAPHY
Putnam, Michael C. J. Virgil’s Aeneid: Interpretation and Influence. Chapel Hill: University of
North Carolina Press, 1995.
One of several excellent modern readings of the Aeneid that stresses the moral ambiguity of Aeneas.
Rajna, Pio. Le fonti dell’Orlando furioso. Florence: Sansoni, 1900.
Rajna relates Statius’s Hopleus and Dymas to Argia and Antigone as well as to Ariosto’s Medoro. The death of Parthenopaeus is the model for that of Dardinello, son of Almonte, whom Rinaldo slays in canto 18 of the Furioso.
Ross, Charles. “Alternating Reigns: Seven against Thebes. A New Translation of the Thebaid.” Two Lines: A Journal of Translation (Spring 1998): 152–77.
I list this publication of a version of my introduction and the first 150 lines of this translation as evidence that much of my thinking about Statius dates from about this period.
Sanok, Catherine. “Criseyde, Cassandre, and the Thebaid: Women and the Theban Subtext of Chaucer’s Troilus and Criseyde.” Studies in the Age of Chaucer 20 (1998): 41–71.
A strong feminist appreciation of the Thebaid as well as a scholarly analysis of the relationship of Chaucer to Statius.
Schwartz, Regina. The Curse of Cain. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1997.
An intriguing reading of the Old Testament that relates fraternal strife, homosexuality, and scarcity to monotheism.
Snijder, H. Thebaid: A Commentary on Book III. Amsterdam: Adolf M. Hakkert, 1968.
The poem is a work of horror and cruelty that shows “to what depths of degradation man can sink when impiety, hatred and jealousy” overcome him.
Togail na Tebe: The Thebaid of Statius. With introduction, translation, vocabulary, and notes by George Calder. Cambridge: At the University Press, 1922.
The Irish text edited from two manuscripts.
Vessey, David. Statius and the Thebaid. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1973.
“It would be wrong to see in the Thebaid any subtle political allegory” (p. 63). A full-length study of the poem.
Wetherbee, Winthrop. “ ‘Per te poeta fui, per te Cristiano’: Dante, Statius, and the Narrator of
Chaucer’s Troilus.” In Vernacular Poetics in the Middle Ages, ed. Lois Ebin. Kalamazoo, Mich.: Medieval Institute Publications, 1984.
In arguing that Chaucer found hints of transcendence in the Thebaid, just as Dante did, Wetherbee offers an uplifting reading of Statius’s poem, despite the darkness of Statius’s vision. Evil dominates the lives of most of the characters. Even Theseus must kill, but Amphiaraus and Menoeceus embody pietas because they are heroic despite knowing they are doomed. Pathenopaeus’s physical appearance signals the absence of “any debasing passion” or worldly awareness of fate. Antigone, too, shows pietas, and the aged Phorbas sees her as a source of hope, despite the crimes of Thebes. Wetherbee suggests that the infusion of virtus into Menoeceus is the source of Dante’s having Statius explain how divine virtù enters the embryonic soul. Like Menoeceus, the soul lives only to die, once it feels divine fire.
Acknowledgments
My need to translate Statius was prompted by a paper on Statius’s pacifism written by CoryAnne Harrigan for a Renaissance seminar. We were reading David Quint’s Epic and Empire (Princeton University Press, 1992), which privileges Virgil and Lucan but not Statius, the third of Rome’s great epic poets. The lacuna seemed obvious; moreover, confronting Statius was, for me, a way to further understand the literary taste of C. S. Lewis. Lewis’s cultural stock is currently being sold short because of his religion and ideas about women (which are not my own), but he knew how to read.
For help in establishing the form of this translation I want to thank Robert Kastor and Allen Mandelbaum. For comments on either the translation or the introduction I am grateful to Emily Allen, Martha Craig, Angelica Duran, and Jennifer Tonsing. Statius (and Boiardo) gave me something to talk about while I was driving Seamus Heaney to the airport a few years ago, and Heaney—a wonderful man—put me in touch with Jonathan Galassi, who kindly gave me ten minutes to pitch Statius. “One degree of separation too much from the general public” was his verdict a week later. And so extra credit must be given to the Johns Hopkins University Press, which has supported me almost from
the beginning. Ann Astell directed my attention to Southey. CoryAnne, now Professor, Harrigan drafted the notes to this volume, a huge task, and deserves far more credit than this small acknowledgment can offer.
Perhaps for political reasons that I point out in my introduction, Statius is currently enjoying a revival among scholars. I want to mention here Betty Rose Nagle’s TheSylvaeof Statius (Indiana University Press, 2004), which reached me when this book was in page proof. Professor Nagle’s introduction adds to our picture of the poet, and the translation helps revive an author who was more than good enough for every major poet in Italy and many in England. Professor Nagle also explains some procedures of translation that I share; for example, Statius has a relatively small vocabulary, “so repeated use of the same word is not necessarily significant” (Nagle, p. 30); sometimes glosses are incorporated into the text for the convenience of the reader. Unlike her, I have chosen in general to ignore Statius’s use of the historical present and have kept to the past tense in English. Another minor difference is that for the most part I retain Statius’s habit of occasionally addressing people in the second person.
One of the many such recent classicists writing on Statius notices that readers of Italian Renaissance romances (like Lewis, like me) find Statius easy to appreciate. This category includes my wife Clare, who approved Statius’s density after the free flow of Boiardo and gave me the go-ahead for this project. This translation is naturally dedicated to her, and to Slaney and Sam, better readers than I ever was at their age.
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