STATIUS, DOMITIAN AND ACKNOWLEDGING PATERNITY 181
wards.^20 In Ovid, for example, it systematically indicates the poet’s
enemies; but in one of his most significant passages, it is also associ-
ated with the thunderbolts of Jupiter (Rem. 369f.), which are an obvi-
ous symbol of political power, thus creating an almost natural, inevi-
table opposition between political power and literature, a hostility of
the monarch towards a successful poet. In this perspective, the image
that Statius attributes to the liuor against his Thebaid, that of praeten-
dere nubila, which reminds the reader of epic poetry of the typical
gesture of Homer’s Zeus, the ‘cloud-gatherer’, could raise the suspi-
cion that a hostility exists on the part of the political authority (the
earthly Jupiter) towards this work which is enjoying success with the
readers (and which will soon, like the Aeneid, receive divine honours,
whereas his enemy will die [occidet]).
I do not think that we must see in Statius’ language any intentional
ambiguities, through which he issues a (dangerous) challenge to impe-
rial power. Rather, there are objective ideological tensions that under-
lie the relationship between literature and politics, and sometimes
emerge more or less overtly. Anyway, the literary authority comes
face to face with the political authority, and sets up a negotiation in
which the reference to the Virgilian and Augustan model (that is to
say, to the relationship between Virgilian poetry and Augustan power)
and to the partly political role that Augustus’ principate assigned to
Virgil’s poetry serves as an effective means to exert pressure on the
new regime, which avowedly took its inspiration, as is well known,
from that political model.^21
The problem that faces the Flavian political regime is in many
ways similar to the one that the ‘literary authority’ of the same period
has to face (and we find a clear reflection of this connection between
the political and the poetic dimension in the work of Statius): it is a
problem of succession and legitimacy, of transmission of power. It is
well known that epic, more than any other literary genre, is closely
associated with power: with the ways in which it is conquered,
wielded and transmitted. Clearly, the problem of power, its control
and its transmission is a particularly sensitive question in Rome dur-
ing the period of the empire, when the dynastic structure becomes the
20 Cf. Georgacoupoulou 2005, 240f.
21 On Augustus as political model of Domitian cf. Nauta 2002a, 352f., 390f., 432;
on the model of Augustan literary patronage, 82ff. and Nauta 2007a.