156 RUURD R. NAUTA
not have shared in them, and compares himself in this imaginary role
to Phoenix, Achilles’ old teacher (94–9), thus alluding not only to his
unwarlike profession, but also to his age.
As we have by now come to expect, Statius consistently presents
himself as a poet, and more specifically as a performer, lyre in hand.
When praying to the gods of the sea for safe passage for Celer, he
works in an address to Palaemon, who before his divinisation had
been a Theban prince, and this enables him to motivate his request by
adducing that he sings of Thebes “with no degenerate plectrum” (40–
1). And when anticipating, towards the end of the poem, Celer’s re-
turn from overseas, Statius imagines that he will immediately strike up
the lyre (131–2). Statius then further imagines how they will enquire
after each other’s vicissitudes during the time of their separation, and
supposes that Celer will tell of his visits to the Euphrates and other
Oriental sites, whereas he himself will report how he will have fin-
ished the Thebaid (136–43). The mention of the Euphrates a few lines
before the end, together with the periphrastic description of the poet’s
own works, clearly evokes the conclusion of the Georgics, where Oc-
tavian’s wars in the East are juxtaposed with Virgil’s composition of
the Georgics and the Bucolics in peaceful Naples.^37 Statius does not
explicitly mention his birthplace in this poem, but the setting is at the
nearby port of Puteoli (modern Pozzuoli) (21–4). So it seems as if, in
the affectionate communication with his amicus, Statius’ identity as a
poet acquires some autobiographical contours: those of an elderly
man, preferring to devote himself to the “studies of inglorious quiet”
in Naples.
Silvae 5.2, in praise of Crispinus, a senatorial youth, son of the
renowned general Vettius Bolanus, is not a full propempticon, but
uses elements of the genre. The imagined situation is that Crispinus is
about to depart on a holiday trip to Tuscany, which fills Statius with
presentiments of a longer and more dangerous voyage, because it is to
be expected that Crispinus will soon receive his first military ap-
pointment; at the end of the poem a messenger from the emperor ar-
37 Both final sections comprise eight lines, but Statius has not gone so far in his
imitation as to mention the Euphrates exactly in the sixth line from the end, as Virgil
did in allusion to Callimachus (cf. Thomas and Scodel 1984, republished in Thomas
1999, 320). Whereas Virgil ends by invoking the beginning of his first work (Tityre,
te patulae cecini sub tegmine fagi), Statius ends with the anticipated end of the work
he is just now finishing (quaeue laboratas claudat mihi pagina Thebas).