Carole E. Newlands - Statius, Poet Between Rome and Naples (Classical Literature and Society) (2012).pdf

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Editor’s Foreword
The aim of this series is to consider Greek and Roman literature primarily
in relation to genre and theme. Its authors hope to break new ground in
doing so but with no intention of dismissing current interpretation where
this is sound; they will be more concerned to engage closely with text,
subtext and context. The series therefore adopts a homologous approach
in looking at classical writers, one of whose major achievements was the
fashioning of distinct modes of thought and utterance in poetry and prose.
This led them to create a number of literary genres evolving their own
particular forms, conventions and rules – genres which live on today in
contemporary culture.
Although studied within a literary tradition, these writers are also
considered within their social and historical context, and the themes they
explore are often both highly specific to that context and yet universal and
everlasting. The ideas they conceive and formulate and the issues they
debate find expression in a particular language, Latin or Greek, and
belong to their particular era in the classical past. But they are also fully
translatable into a form that is accessible as well as intelligible to those
living in later centuries, in their own vernacular. Hence all quoted pas-
sages are rendered into clear, modern English.
These are books, then, which are equally for readers with or without
knowledge of the Greek and Latin languages and with or without an
acquaintance with the civilisation of the ancient world. They have plenty
to offer the classical scholar, and are ideally suited to students reading for
a degree in classical subjects. Yet they will interest too those studying
European and contemporary literature, history and culture who wish to
discover the roots and springs of our classical inheritance.
The series owes a special indebtedness and thanks to Pat Easterling,
who from the start was a constant source of advice and encouragement.
Others whose help has been invaluable are Robin Osborne who, if ever we
were at a loss to think of an author for a particular topic, almost always
came up with a suitable name or two and was never stinting of his time or
opinion, and Tony Woodman, now at Virginia. The unfailing assistance of
the late John W. Roberts, editor of the
Oxford Dictionary of the Classical
World, is also gratefully acknowledged. Deborah Blake, Editorial Director
at Duckworth and later Bloomsbury, has throughout offered full support,
boundless enthusiasm and wise advice.
Finally, I pay tribute to the inspirational genius which Michael Gun-
vii
Editor’s Foreword
ningham,
fons et origo
of the series and an editor of consummate skill and
phenomenal energy, brought to the enterprise. His imprint is everywhere:
sine quo, non.
David Taylor
viii
Acknowledgements
I owe thanks to many people and institutions for their support in writing
this book – the University of Wisconsin Madison; the University of Rich-
mond; the University of Colorado Boulder; Clare Hall, Cambridge; the
Cambridge Classics Faculty; the Institute for Advanced Study, Princeton;
and the Loeb Foundation. Harald Anderson, Christopher Chinn, Bill
Dominik, Alex Hardie, Gianpiero Rosati, and Elizabeth Tyler, among
others, were generous in sharing their work. Reina Caillier was an indis-
pensable bibliographer and research assistant. Thanks too to my patient
editors. Finally thanks to Maya Feile Tomes for taking me the final mile
and beyond.
Carole E. Newlands
ix
1
Introduction
In 1417 a revolution occurred in the perception of Statius, in the Middle
Ages one of the most famous poets of antiquity. With the discovery of a
manuscript containing the
Siluae,
occasional poems celebrating important
events in the social lives of Statius and his contemporaries, the poet, who
had been assumed to be a teacher of rhetoric from Toulouse in France, was
revealed to be from Naples in Southern Italy. As if to emphasise the point,
an unnamed hand wrote in the margin of M, our sole copy of that manu-
script (which is again lost), at 3.5.78 the annotation
Neapolitanus fuit
Statius
(Statius was a Neapolitan).
1
As a result of that discovery, the
literary and scholarly community received not only a new body of work
from Statius; they also received a new perception of him as a Neapolitan,
closely tied therefore to the Epicurean and Greek traditions of that region
of Italy.
In addition to five books of short poems entitled
Siluae,
Statius wrote
an early poem on Domitian’s wars,
De Bello Germanico,
of which only four
lines survive,
2
and the epic poems
Thebaid
and
Achilleid,
the latter incom-
plete. Juvenal, perhaps spuriously, suggests that Statius also wrote a
pantomime script
Agaue.
3
Fitzgerald has recently proposed that Martial,
Statius’ contemporary, is our Roman poet of the moment; he appeals to
early 21st-century metaphorical tastes for ‘browsing, grazing, surfing, and
cruising’ with his scurrilous, witty, ‘sound-bite’ poetry.
4
Statius in his short
poems, the
Siluae,
and Martial in the epigrams sometimes write on the
same topic, and seem to have cultivated some of the same literary patrons.
But where Martial is brief and witty, Statius tends to be expansive in his
Siluae
as well as in his epics; his leisurely style, replete with mythological
allusions, is currently not much in favour. Indeed, Martial rejected myth
as too old-fashioned for his short, urbane poems. Perhaps targeting Statius
in particular, he writes with epic sarcasm (10.4.1-2):
qui Oedipoden cali-
gantemque Thyesten, / Colchidas et Scyllas, quid nisi monstra legis?
(you
who read of Oedipus and of Thyestes during the eclipse, and of the
Colchians and Scyllas, aren’t you just reading about monstrosities?).
5
Statius’ poetry is mostly written in hexameter and generally aims for a
high style, eschewing the obscenity and materiality of Roman urban life as
depicted by Martial. When he writes of love, for instance, he often refers
to marriage rather than to illicit passion.
6
His hendecasyllabic poems are
festive (Silu. 1.6; 2.7; 4.3; 4.9), in accord with the proprieties of that metre,
but they are not lascivious.
7
1

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