154 RUURD R. NAUTA
After further apostrophe to Stella, reassuring and encouraging him,
Statius takes up a position in the house from which he may tell his
story (46–50); when this is finished, he calls upon other poets, but
especially Stella’s elegiac colleagues, to sing (247–55), and concludes
with exhorting the bridal pair to produce children (266–7).
This presentation of the relationship between poet and addressee
significantly contrasts with the reality, as Statius specifies it in the
preface to Book 1, where he tells Stella: “you know that your epitha-
lamium, which you had enjoined upon me, was written in two days”
(1.ep.21–2). Whereas in the preface it is Stella who gives orders to
Statius, in accordance with the social asymmetry obtaining between
them, in the poem it is Statius who is in charge, wielding an authority
that can only accrue to him in his capacity as a poet. Moreover,
whereas the preface is explicit about the written nature of the poem, in
the poem itself all reference to writing is avoided, and we have only
singing and lyre-playing by poets both human and divine.^31 As we
shall see, this is typical of the Silvae (apart from some poems in Book
4):^32 Statius combines his description of the modern Roman world in
which his addressees move with the fiction of a more archaic and
more Greek world, in which the elite, at certain ceremonial occasions,
would be entertained and instructed by the performances of poets.^33
Yet even within this fiction, Statius still feels the need to explain what
right he has to assume a ceremonial role at this wedding. Because an
appeal to Stella’s request might undermine his authority, he adduces a
personal relationship: “as for me, surely it is not one love and a single
cause for song that moves me” (256–7), where the word “love”
(amor) suggests amicitia. But the double motivation turns out to
amount to no more than the circumstance that Stella is a poet like him
31 See 1–6 and 16–7 (Apollo and the Muses), 46ff. (Statius, inspired by the Muse
Erato), 95–102 and 197–9 (Stella), 219–28 (Apollo), 237–9 (Hymen), 241 (Stella),
248–50 (various poets), 256–7 (Statius).
32 On the avoidance of references to writing in the Silvae see Coleman in this
volume, 29–30. I would only dispute her claim that this avoidance extends to the
prefaces, which I see, on the contrary, as consciously reinstating the written nature of
the poems, not only in using the verb scribere itself (1.ep.21–2, 2.ep.11, 16, 20,
4.ep.10) or its compounds (1.ep.26), but also verbs like tradere (1.ep.19, 2.ep.3, 18),
dare (1.ep.11, 2.ep.11, 4.ep.28) or recipere (1.ep.30), which imply the handing over
of a manuscript, and in calling the individual poems libelli (1.ep.2, 16, 27, 2.ep.15,
3.ep.2, 11, 23) or opuscula (2.ep.3, 4.ep.23).
33 The technique is also at home in Augustan praise poetry, especially the Odes of
Horace, but I cannot go into that here.