STATIUS, DOMITIAN AND ACKNOWLEDGING PATERNITY 187
Sun’, Lucan must neutralise the image that this association inevitably
evokes by making him a successful Phaethon.^34 In a similar way, Sta-
tius himself in Silv. 4.3.136–8 flatters Domitian by declaring him bet-
ter than nature itself and asserting that, if he flammigeros teneret axes
(i.e. if he were to drive the chariot of the Sun),^35 he would not provoke
Phaethon’s disaster, but, by contrast, would improve the earth’s cli-
mate. The risky comparison between Domitian and Phaethon, in other
words, is aptly turned to the emperor’s advantage. That Phaethon must
have represented long since the model of the emperor as an incompe-
tent leader dragging the world towards a catastrophe is well docu-
mented. Biographical tradition attributes to the wit of the elderly Ti-
berius, lucidly conscious of the character of the young Caligula, a
statement that defines him as the future “Phaethon of the world”:
quod sagacissimus senex ita prorsus perspexerat, ut aliquotiens praedi-
caret exitio suo omniumque Gaium uiuere et se natricem populo
Romano, Phaethontem orbi terrarum educare.
(Suet. Cal. 11)
This last was so clearly evident to the shrewd old man, that he used to
say now and then that to allow Gaius to live would prove the ruin of
himself and of all men, and that he was rearing a viper for the Roman
people and a Phaethon for the world.^36This image of Phaethon as an inefficient leader of the world appears
to be quite familiar to Seneca,^37 and must already have been wide-
spread in Hellenistic literature on kingship,^38 thus immediately recog-
nisable for readers of imperial poetry.^39
34 Whether mentioning a peril in order to negate it is a cautious attitude, or rather a
counterproductive one, is of course quite another matter.
35 But others take flammigeros axes as referring to the sky (‘the flaming sky’
Shackleton Bailey); cf. van Dam 1992, 204 n. 37. In favour of a reference to the
chariot of the Sun: Smolenaars 2006, 238–9.
36 Translation by Rolfe 1914.
37 As degl’Innocenti Pierini 1990, 251ff. has fully illustrated. On the other hand, in
Seneca we read also a positive evaluation of Phaethon as symbol of youthful courage
and enthusiasm: cf., after Chevallier 1982, 402, esp. Duret 1988.
38 Cf. e.g. Dio Chrys. Orat. 1.46 (delivered in the first years of Trajan’s princi-
pate), to be connected with the treatise attributed to the Pythagorean Ecphantus from
Syracuse (V cent. B.C.E.), but generally dated to the Hellenistic age or later (cf.
Squilloni 1991, 35–60, who proposes to date it to I–II century C.E.): they share the
idea that only legitimate kings can stand the bright light of the Sun, that is of the royal
office (and Phaethon, who cannot, is adduced as a symbol of the evil king). A trace of
it can also be seen in Seneca’s Cl. 1.8.4 Multa contra te lux est (cf. Duret 1988, 145f.