Page:Statius (Mozley 1928) v1.djvu/30

This page has been proofread, but needs to be validated.

INTRODUCTION

Caesar deigns to know thee, and the youth of Italy eagerly learns and recounts thy verse.”

The fame that Statius so anxiously yearned for was his throughout the Middle Ages. His epic, though of the ancient world, seems to herald the new age: Amphiaraus is almost the warrior bishop, Chaucer, indeed, calls him “the bisshop Amphiorax”; dragons, sorcerers, enchanted woods, maidens waving to their lovers from high turrets, and other romantic features fill the pages of his poem, while its actual influence can be traced in medieval literature.[1] All readers of Dante remember the meeting of Statius and Virgil in Purgatory (Cantos 21, 22), and the touching lines in which the poet narrates the recognition of Virgil by his humble and admiring follower. Dante’s belief that Statius was a Christian was due, according to Comparetti,[2] to the latter’s reverence for Virgil, whom the Middle Ages accepted as prophet of Christ on the strength of the Fourth Eclogue. Mr. P. H. Wicksteed thinks that the words of xii. 496 “ignotae tantum felicibus arae” (“the altar is unknown only to the prosperous”) may have led to an identification with the altar to the Unknown God, “ignoto Deo,” seen at Athens by St. Paul (Acts xvii. 23).[3] See also A. W. Verrall’s

  1. ↑ For Amphiorax see Chaucer, Troilus and Criseyde, ii. 103; dragons, i. 600, v. 505, sorcerers, iv. 443, x. 600, wood, iv. 419, maidens, iv. 89, vi. 546, Ach. ii. 23. Chaucer’s Knight’s Tale has borrowed largely from the Thebaid (through Boceaccio’s Teseide), and its influence is seen in a poem entitled the “Lamentations of Oedipus, King of Thebes” (Anthology of Mediaeval Latin, S. Gaselee, 1925).
  2. ↑ Virgil in the Middle Ages, Chapter vii.
  3. ↑ Essays in Commemoration of Dante: “Dante and the Latin Poets,” 1921.
xxvi
This article is issued from Wikisource. The text is available under Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 4.0 unless otherwise noted. Additional terms may apply for the media files.