Page:Statius (Mozley 1928) v1.djvu/19

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INTRODUCTION

Thebaid does not end satisfactorily: that Statius was worried over it we may gather from a hint in the Silvae (iii. 2. 143). H.W. Garrod has defended the Thebaid as an “episodic” epic, and that is probably its most conspicuous feature; at the same time, though Statius had every right to make his poem episodic if he wished, it would be wrong to overlook the unity that it does possess, even if it is less obvious than in a story like the Argonautica, for example, or the Aeneid.

The same critic has spoken of the poet’s “tenderness, mysticism, and piety—in short, his Christianity”; it is true that the tenderness at times becomes sentimentality, at times a morbid emphasizing of the horrible, yet, generally speaking, Statius responds sympathetically to the tender emotions: Argia as wife and daughter, Hypsipyle in the anguish caused by the loss of the babe Opheltes, Antigone as sister, are faithfully drawn, and the relations of mother and son seem to have had a particular attraction for Statius, e.g. Atalanta and Parthenopaeus, Ismenis and Crenaeus in the Thebaid (notice, too, how many times he refers to Ino and Palaemon), Thetis and Achilles in the Achilleid.[1]

With regard to the gods, Jupiter and Nature are both referred to by Statius as supreme, quite apart from Fate or Destiny;[2] he does not actually identify them, but we may see here a tendency to

  1. ↑ In Virgil, as Warde Fowler has pointed out, the father-son relation is more prominent. Statius loves to describe children; cf. the Opheltes episode, and the three epicedia (Silv. ii. 1, ii. 6, v. 5), and such touches as “qui pueris sopor” (Ach. i. 229).
  2. ↑ There is also the mysterious triplicis mundi summum of iv. 516, for whom see note ad loc.

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