Page:Statius (Mozley 1928) v1.djvu/28
INTRODUCTION
and to reverence its footsteps;[1] from them we may gather that he was humble enough not to think of himself as a rival of Virgil, though acknowledging that poet as the chief inspirer of his work. In fact, the plan and chief incidents of the Aeneid seem to be reproduced with an astonishing scrupulousness in the Thebaid. Virgil, however, was not the only poet whom Statius laid under contribution; an analysis of the Thebaid shows that Ovid and Lucan, and in a lesser degree Seneca and Valerius Flaccus, have incidents, or at any rate, details borrowed from them by our author.[2] In versification he is, on the whole, Ovidian; there is no trace of Virgil’s gravity, or of Lucan’s heaviness, but the hexameter is predominantly the smooth, unelided line of Ovid, though the hephthemimeral pause and caesura, characteristic of Silver Latin verse, is frequent.
As for the authorities on whom Statius drew for the actual story of the Seven, we have already referred to the Thebaid of Antimachus; its fragments, how-
- ↑ nec tu divinam Aeneida tempta,
sed longe sequere et vestigia semper adora.Cf. also references in the Silvae, iv. 4. 53, iv. 7. 25.
- ↑ e.g. Virgil: i. 197 sqq. = Aen. i. 233 sqq.; x. 1 sqq.; ii. 133 = Aen. vii. 341; the Argive rush to arms, and Catalogue (Bk. III.) = Aen. vii. 572, etc., the Games. Parthenopaeus = Camilla; Hopleus and Dymas = Nisus and Euryalus, and many others.
Lucan: iv. 369, etc. = Phars. i. 469, 674; iv. 725 = Ph. iv. 324.
Ovid: v. 505 = Met. iii. 32; vi. 825, etc. = Met. ix. 33 (cf. also Luc. Ph. iv. 655).
Seneca: ii. 269, etc. = Medea, 734 etc.; iv. 443 = Oed. 556.
Homer is also largely followed in the funeral rites and games of Bk. VI., and in the river fight of Bk. IX. (Il. xvii., xviii., and xxi.). Also some of the episodes of the night-raid (Bk. X.) are from the Doloneia.