Thebaid

The primary theme of Statius’s Thebaid is the corruptive, malevolent nature of monarchal power. Every king in the Thebaid (except, perhaps, Adrastus) is portrayed as evil in some way, and their corruptness seems directly proportional to their level of power. Eteocles is the prime mortal example of a cruel tyrant, but Jupiter exercises the same tyranny in heaven. He bullies the other gods in his court, knowing full well that they wish they could speak up but are too afraid to dare (e.g. Book 1, 288-9). Even Polynices, the more kind-hearted brother on the surface, angles shrewdly for political favor (Book 3, line 382), a populist technique Statius’s Roman audience would have recognized well.

The Thebans subjects are quick to mention, in fact, that Polynices only behaves differently from his brother because he is not currently on the throne (Book 1, 186-91). In their final face off, Polynices is just as cruel and insane as his brother. While Eteocles abuses his position and unjustly tries to keep his throne, Polynices is equally disordered in his insatiable quest for it. Absolute power, Statius posits, corrupts absolutely—as does the pursuit of power. Even lesser kings in the text are characterized by their tyrannical cruelty, like Crotopus (who executes his daughter for being raped by Apollo, Book 1, 594-5) and Lycurgus (who unjustly tries to kill Hypsipyle, Book 5, 654-67). To contextualize Statius’s extreme suspicion of monarchic power, it is helpful to consider Roman history up to his day.

The Roman experiment was an exercise in a powerful nation moving from republican ideals to imperial tyranny (a process excellently summarized by the volume’s translator, Jane Wilson Joyce, in her Introduction). In short, in the hundred years or so before Statius’s day, a series of destructive civil conflicts transformed Rome from a constitutional republic into a monarchy.

Scholars debate the exact event which killed the Roman Republic but agree that its first emperor, Augustus (63 BCE-14 AD), represented a radical departure from the rule of many to the rule of one. Virgil’s Aeneid, on which the Thebaid is heavily modeled, sought to make sense of this transition. While the death of the Republic was no doubt something to be mourned, the ascension of a single, powerful ruler—the emperor Augustus—also quelled decades of civil wars which nearly ripped the Roman state in two. For Virgil, a “good king” was perhaps a price worth paying to ensure stability and prosperity.

Not everyone thought so highly of Augustus and the shift to empire. Virgil’s younger contemporary Ovid took a more irreverent posture towards Augustus in his works; he was eventually banished from Rome and died an exile. Thirty years before Statius, the poet Lucan wrote Latin literature’s most subversive epic, Civil War, during the reign of the tyrannical emperor Nero (37-68 AD). Devoid of a divine apparatus of any sort, Civil War covers the climatic civil war between Julius Caesar and Pompey the Great (49-45 BCE), the very conflict which led to the rise of Augustus. Like the Thebaid, Civil War zeroes in on the connection between imperial tyranny and madness; Lucan’s Julius Caesar, for example, is a capricious megalomaniac (a characterization echoed by Statius via Eteocles). Civil War’s criticisms of the imperial system are less shrouded than those of Statius, and Lucan paid the price. In 65 BCE he was implicated in a plot against Nero and forced to commit suicide. His uncle, Seneca the Younger, an important literary influence on Statius, was also accused and executed.

All of these connections are important in making sense of what Statius felt he could say in his Thebaid—and what he could not. In choosing civil war between brothers as his topic, he certainly took a risk. Not only was civil war a touchy subject for the Romans for all the reasons mentioned above; it was also widely rumored that the emperor Domitian was intensely jealous of his handsome, charming older sibling, the previous emperor Titus. Domitian, meanwhile—not unlike Eteocles—was known for his short temper, his suspicious nature, and his tendency towards cruelty. Statius does not shy away from further linking his Thebes to contemporary Rome: He includes many anachronistic Roman customs in his “Greek” story, from the way the characters perform auguries to the way they box (Joyce makes good mention of these moments in her End Notes).

At the same time, Statius always maintains plausible deniability. Unflattering character analogues for Domitian can be easily attributed to others (like Nero, for example). Moreover, Statius clearly knows how to play the part of court poet: The prologue of the Thebaid contains a panegyric, or high praise of Domitian (Book 1, 17-33), an expected element of imperial poems from the time of Virgil’s Aeneid.

That being said, the political vision of the Thebaid is undoubtedly one which, like Lucan’s Civil War, reveals autocracy in its most unhinged and violent form. While Virgil’s Aeneid sought to paint an upward, positive trajectory for the Roman future, Statius (and Lucan) suggest its path to be much more dysfunctional—and more cyclical. Rome’s fate under the rule of tyrannical emperors, they argue, is not eternal greatness, but rather eternal, suicidal civil war.