The Thebaid Read online

  The THEBAID

  Publius Papinius Statius

  The THEBAID

  Seven against Thebes

  Translated with an Introduction

  by Charles Stanley Ross

  © The Johns Hopkins University Press

  All rights reserved. Published 2004

  Printed in the United States of America on acid-free paper

  9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

  The Johns Hopkins University Press

  2715 North Charles Street

  Baltimore, Maryland 21218-4363

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  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Statius, P. Papinius (Publius Papinius)

  [Thebais. English]

  The Thebaid : seven against Thebes / Publius Papinius Statius ; translated with an introduction by Charles Stanley Ross.

  p. cm.

  Includes bibliographical references (p. ).

  ISBN 0-8018-6908-0 (acid-free paper)

  1. Seven against Thebes (Greek mythology)—Poetry. 2. Epic poetry, Latin—Translations into English. 3. Polyneices (Greek mythology)—Poetry. 4. Eteocles (Greek mythology)— Poetry. 5. Sibling rivalry—Poetry. 6. Thebes (Greece)—Poetry. I. Ross, Charles Stanley.

  II. Title.

  PA6697.E5T5 2004

  871′.01—dc22 2004008928

  A catalog record for this book is available from the British Library.

  Now for the bare-pick’d bone of majesty

  Doth dogged war bristle his angry crest.

  Shakespeare, King John 4.3.148–49

  I do not scruple to prefer Statius to Virgil; his images are strongly

  conceived, and clearly painted, and the force of his language,

  while it makes the reader feel, proves that the author felt himself.

  Robert Southey, preface to Joan of Arc (1798)

  Contents

  Introduction

  The THEBAID

  1 Exile

  2 Ambush

  3 Omens

  4 Thirst

  5 Women of Lemnos

  6 Funeral Games

  7 Earth Opens

  8 Savage Hunger

  9 Tide and Time

  10 Sacrifices

  11 Piety

  12 Clemency

  Notes

  Selected Proper Names

  Selected Annotated Bibliography

  Acknowledgments

  Introduction

  Publius Papinius Statius lived from approximately a.d. 45 to 96. He was favored by the emperor Domitian, during a reign that degenerated into despotism. Although Rome was still pagan, Statius composed his epic in a period of religious fervor, within a few years of the Christian Gospels, the letters of Saint Paul, and the Midrash commentators. Like other writers on religious issues, Statius constantly questions the relationship between violence and divinity, but he differs in his decision to use the form of narrative poetry in the epic style as a vehicle for his thought. His work was ranked with that of Homer and Virgil throughout the Middle Ages and the Renaissance. Statius appears as a Christian in Dante’s Purgatory, and he stands as a pillar of poetry in Chaucer’s The House of Fame. Many critical editions of the Thebaid (pronounced thee-bah-id or The-bai-id) date from the early seventeenth century, a period of religious war and strife in Europe.

  Contributing scenes of terminal destruction to the vocabulary of Western literature, Statius writes of the spectacular deaths of six of the seven heroes who wage war against Thebes: Amphiaraus, Tydeus, Hippomedon, Parthenopaeus, Capaneus, and Polynices. The powerful impact of reading how Tydeus spends his last moments alive gnawing the severed head of his enemy prompted Dante to describe Ugolino chewing the skull of Archbishop Ruggieri in canto 32 of the Inferno. Statius is also known for illustrating a key stage in the decline of myth and the rise of allegory, as C. S. Lewis pointed out in The Allegory of Love. Boccaccio, for example, used the Thebaid, with its figure of Clemency, its House of Mars and House of Sleep, as a model for his influential Teseida. Boccaccio’s story, in which two men fight for the favors not of a city but a woman, in turn was the source of Chaucer’s Knight’s Tale, one of whose themes is the inability of social bonds to forestall violence.

  The conditions of society often determine its aesthetics, and it is interesting to look in the past for changes in critical sensibility. A fifteenth-century Irish translator found in the Thebaid a prescient understanding of the forces that threaten civilization. When all ideologies are unmasked, no one’s identity is safe, except the barbarian’s. Irish culture had reached such a point in 1487, when the violence of social disintegration gave birth to a translation in Gaelic. That work begins by rehearsing a series of local murders, and it is not hard to imagine the translator seeking understanding in Statius for the violence around him. The Irish Togail na Tebe incorporated into its text the fifth-century Latin commentary by Placidius Lactantius that had appeared in the first printed editions, and it was influenced by the medieval tradition of chivalric romance. Thus, at the beginning of the speech where Oedipus curses his sons, the translator—to explain otherwise elliptical references to Thebes’s history—has Oedipus duel Laius at the crossroads because neither man would stoop to give his name. Such readings are creative and intense. A modern translation may reveal something equally compelling.

  Statius’s Thebaid relates the strife of two brothers, Polynices and Eteocles, the sons of Oedipus, who struggle for control of an ancient Greek city. The myth of the founding of Thebes comes earlier, how armed soldiers sprang up from the furrows Cadmus plowed, creating discord and civil war. The story of Antigone comes after, the subject of Sophocles’ tragedy about a woman caught between the law of men—Creon’s decree that she not be allowed to bury her brother Polynices—and a higher morality, which demands that she tend her brother’s body. Statius’s subject, however, is neither the raw force that underlies civility nor the moral blindness of human lives but rather the sad horror and inevitability of conflict. The Thebaidis not about society as it develops—the emergence of civilization, order, and language as they overpower brute violence and political chaos—but the stress lines of the modern: the return of repressed violence and the fragmentation of culture. There is, it seems, such a thing as too much success, as well as too much failure, whether in Rome two thousand years ago or today. Even unopposed power may be uneducated, unsteady, liable to new problems but old emotions. Humans are self-destructive; anger comes easily.

  Writing in a rhetorical style that stressed the emotions, Statius says that his “task is to give length to lives” (4.33; line numbers refer to the Latin text), and to do so he postpones the mutual slaughter of Polynices and Eteocles until almost the end of the poem. He replays, in his own style, many motifs that he drew from Virgil’s Aeneid. In that earlier Roman epic, the goddess Juno tries to delay the founding of Rome but her efforts are thwarted by fate. Nonetheless, Virgil is always economical; his story moves forward briskly. Statius, by contrast, prefers to linger. The provocation that drives the Argives to war occupies the Thebaid for three books. Some years then pass before the beginning of book 4, where Statius first catalogs the forces of the seven against Thebes and almost at once inserts the most pronounced digression in the poem: Bacchus, the god of wine, causes a drought that impedes the Argive advance on his hometown. The tactic Bacchus announces—”meanwhile I will use fraud to weave delay” (4.677)— resembles Statius’s own technique, for Statius relishes the story of Hypsipyle, who first leads the Argives to water, then recounts the saga of Lemnos (book 5), where the women slaughtered their men. The death of Archemorus requires lengthy funeral games (book 6) before the war can be resumed.

  The story that follows these delays is s
omewhat similar to the plot of the film The Magnificent Seven: a sequence of assaults by seven heroes, each with a unique personality. Most of the heroes die; there is a final battle, and then an outside intervention. Like the Thebaid, Hollywood’s postwar epic seems to represent history’s winners. Seven American cowboys ride into Mexico to free a small town from bandits. The good guys succeed, yet they are oddly troubled by their profession: they long to hang up their guns and find stability, a family, a place to settle. The film imitates, often very closely, The Seven Samurai, made in 1954 by Akira Kurosawa. The Japanese film maker, like Statius, understood what it meant to live in the wake of the grim victories that established an imperial state. It is so easy to go awry.

  We too move hesitantly into the future, the new world order, and it may be that Statius’s art of passion, delay, and extension provides some form of guidance. His poetry combines horror and grace, war and romantic variety. Its sheer intensity still speaks to us, if we listen. This new translation seeks to give Statius a modern voice in clear, unstilted, and rhythmic American verse. Statius’s lines conjure a vision we see with our ears, a set of themes and notes unlike anything else but, at the same time, oddly familiar. Strange, dark, and nervous, the poem creates a continual contemporaneity. “But here, at present, now” (1.15): the poet’s triadic affirmation insists on the relevance of this epic of Thebes to our own political consciousness.

  Statius’s Life

  Statius’s epic strongly influenced Western literature before anyone knew much about its author. Medieval writers inferred Statius’s personality from the Thebaid, from an unfinished poem on the youth of Achilles called the Achilleid, and from scattered comments, such as one by the satirist Juvenal, who said Statius was penurious. Early in the fifteenth century the Italian humanist Poggio Bracciolini discovered a manuscript of occasional poems and personal reflections titled the Silvae. (The name means “raw pieces,” sticks or wood; Ben Jonson would similarly title his collection of lyrics Timber.) An edition appeared in 1494. The master of horror and fraternal strife, the creator of screeching furies and raging warriors, turns out to have been a congenial professional writer, ready to provide poems to order for a wealthy society. He wrote in praise of his contemporary Lucan, for example, whose story of the civil war between Pompey and Caesar rivaled Statius’s epic during the Middle Ages and Renaissance. He composed wedding pieces, called epithalamions, and his rhetorical style sometimes reminds one of Milton’s L’Allegro (“hence, Cares”). He mentions his passion for singing of Thebes and his thoughts about how to end his poem (3.2.29). He several times refers to the myth of Palaemon that so oddly recurs in the Thebaid. The Silvae suggests that Statius propitiated the god to protect his friends at sea.

  Besides showing us a somewhat superstitious but cultured poet at home with the works of Ovid, Virgil, Lucretius, Valerius Flaccus, and various forms of poetry, the Silvae provides us a glimpse of Roman life among the well-heeled. A poem about a villa at Tibur mentions grottoes and marbles, quiet shades, buildings, and pools. In a poem thanking Domitian for an estate where Statius can escape the summer heat, a thunderstorm interrupts a picnic and the revelers retreat to a small shrine dedicated to Hercules. Slave girls parade through the emperor’s games. Dante may have had it right when he reversed Juvenal and made Statius a prodigal. Everywhere we see the wealth of Rome, the vast reach of the empire, and its trade in gold, jewels, marble, exotic foods, wild animals, woods, cloth, and wines. Aqueducts carry water to the capital; fortresses protect its frontiers. Statius loved hot baths.

  Sexual morality seems to have been variously prescribed in first-century Rome. The Silvae several times praises Parthenopaeus, one of the seven against Thebes, whose name refers to his feminine features. One poem celebrates the emperor’s dedicating a minion’s blond tresses to the god Asclepius (3.4). Statius compliments Domitian for passing a law forbidding the creation of eunuchs. Elsewhere he reproaches his wife for despairing at his plan to retire to his native Naples: Vesuvius, he says, has not destroyed everything in the region. He celebrates his wife’s fidelity, although she still loves her first husband and misses her daughter. He recalls how she kissed him when he won the Alban wreath for poetry and consoled him when he lost a poetic contest by the Capitol. She shared the long labor of his Thebaid.

  Throughout his minor poetry Statius shows an artist’s sensitivity. He appreciates architecture, sculpture, literature, and beauty. Years after the death of his father, he thanks him for guiding his epic in the footsteps of the ancient bards (priscorum vatum). He admits to polishing his Thebaidendlessly (4.7). Perhaps his most charming poem is a little ode to sleep. Wracked with insomnia, he asks not for a shower of drowsiness but only a touch of the tip of Sleep’s wand.

  Critics contend about the extent to which the Thebaid reflects Statius’s views on contemporary politics. During the first century Rome was ruled by those whom Edward Gibbon in The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empirecalled the iron emperors, despots such as Tiberius (a.d. 14–37), the almost insane Caligula (37–41), and Nero (54–68). Four pretenders struggled for power in 68–69, after Nero died, ending a line that traced itself back to Julius Caesar. They represented, in turn, the power of the Spanish legions, the imperial household in Rome, the army of the Rhine, and the armies of the Danube and Middle East. The winner was Titus Flavius Vespasian (70–79). He had two sons, Titus (79–81), who captured Jerusalem in 70 and later completed the construction of Rome’s Colisseum, which his father had begun, and Domitian (81–96). Despite hints of rivalry between the brothers, Statius’s audience, like that of today, would have been unsure whether Statius meant to mirror contemporary politics in his epic. It may be that Statius both courted and avoided relevance. As John Henderson argues, the Romans could hardly not read into the Thebaid the story of Vespasian and his two sons, whose troubled reigns followed the civil wars led by Galba, Otho, and Vitellius: “Myth was always a vehicle of civic thought, otherwise our reading of Latin would be dead” (p. 221).

  My own view is that emotions, customs, and attitudes, rather than specific events, connect Thebes to contemporary Rome. Quintillian advised poets not to be too obvious, but the passions of the Thebaid are real enough, despite—or because of—its mythic plot. For example, in a lament for the death of his son, whom Statius had adopted as an infant, he remarks that his own name was the first word his son spoke. He gives the same blessing to Hypsipyle in the Thebaid, who made the mother of Archemorus jealous because it was Hypsipyle, the nurse, who experienced the baby’s first motions. Where Virgil salutes the birth of a child in his celebrated fourth eclogue, Statius mourns for the death of children by means of a rhetorical style that everywhere strives to put troubles at arm’s length. A poem in the Silvae about someone else’s dead son mentions Palaemon, whom Ino drowned, and Opheltes, the baby torn by a serpent as he lay in the grass of Lerna (cf. Silvae 2.1 and Thebaid 5.588–604).

  Besides touching on intimate emotions, the story of Thebes shows how a belief in destiny allows people to accept their misfortunes. In his essay “On Fate” Ralph Waldo Emerson defines destiny as the minister who executes in this world what God has foreseen. Citing Chaucer’s Knight’s Tale(which begins with a Latin quotation from the Thebaid), Emerson claims that a heroic belief in fate makes people free. Statius anticipates this thought. Six of the seven against Thebes are doomed to die and know it, once Amphiaraus reads the auguries and Tiresias foresees the future in the flames of hell. The war is fated to fail, yet no one alters his actions. Each champion perseveres in the enterprise that dooms him. Statius is regularly accused of not constructing a sound plot. Tasso and Boileau and Pope said he should have started in medias res, and the second half of the poem strains to overcome sequential deaths by fortune, drowning, lightning, and misjudgment. Yet the linearity of the Thebaid, like the theme of delay, challenges fate. Statius’s heroes exemplify what Emerson called the “impulse of choosing and acting in the soul.” They celebrate favorable omens and ignore signs of disaster (the point
of the funeral games in book 6). Human hatred may never die; men may be fools to read the future; the Argive heroes perish in a questionable cause but, as Statius tells the story, they die freely.

  Statius himself died at the very beginning of Rome’s greatest century, the era of the golden emperors Nerva, Trajan, Hadrian, Antoninus Pius, and Marcus Aurelius, which lasted from 96 to 180. During this period Rome finally renounced its pretensions to territories beyond the Euphrates. Given the good fortune of Statius’s poem, it is possible to believe that its generally pacifist but heroic tenor found appreciation in the age that followed his death.

  Statius and Virgil

  Although Homer’s Iliad is the source of most of the features of the Western epic, from catalogs of armies to divine interventions, Statius openly admired Virgil’s Aeneid and often developed elements of his Roman predecessor’s plot, even when these derived from Homer. The theme of delay, for example, arguably goes back to Achilles’ anger at Agamemnon that both delays the hero’s return to war against the Trojans and provides the unity that Aristotle so much admired in Homer’s poem. In Virgil’s hands a similar delay occurs as Juno prevents the Trojan refugees from finding their destined homeland. Statius eliminates the Odyssean element of Virgil’s epic; his armies do not wander the Mediterranean in ships, but he does imitate Virgil’s reprise of the theme of delay when, after the Trojans land in the right place, Juno calls on the demonic forces of the underworld to postpone their settlement in Latium. Just as Allecto rouses the hounds of Ascanius against Silvia’s pet stag in Aeneid7, Tisiphone maddens the sacred tigers of Bacchus (Thebaid 7.579). But where Virgil is concise and confines Allecto to a single episode, Statius spreads the role of Tisiphone throughout the poem. She hears Oedipus’s call in the first book, lifts her serpent tresses from the waters of Cocytus, and enters the upper world, where she remains until the end of the story.