200 LORENZO SANNA
to increase the heroic and warlike characteristics of the puer’s forma
uirilis.
Most emblematic is the case of Statius’ Parthenopaeus. In contem-
porary poetry he often takes on the role of exemplum of the moral and
aesthetic characteristics of the child-hero.^12 The puluis belli accompa-
nies all the events in the puer’s life. It characterizes his appearance,
his dreams and his fatal delusions.^13 From the first time Parthenopaeus
is portrayed, dust is the ideal setting of the child-hero’s dreams of
glory. In the dreamlike atmosphere of battle, where weapons clang
and trumpets blast,^14 he innocently dreams of wallowing in the dust of
the battlefield, with his blond locks, and of returning in triumph, rid-
ing a beautiful horse taken from the enemy:
Prosilit audaci Martis percussus amore,
arma, tubas audire calens et puluere belli
flauentem sordere comam captoque referri
hostis equo
(Theb. 4.260–3)
Forth he dashes, smitten by Mars’ audacious ardour, burning to hear
arms and trumpets and soil his yellow hair with the dust of battle and
return on a foeman’s captured horse.The hero’s childish innocence appears to us not only in his teenage
looks,^15 but also from his temper and his enthusiasm for a war which
seems devoid of ideals and even devoid of the cruelty of blood and
danger, more like a children’s game,^16 a sort of escape from the te-
dium of hunting and wandering in the woods:^17
12 Cf. Silv. 2.6.41–5; Mart. 6.77.2, 9.56.5–8, 10.4.3–7; Vessey 1973, 294–302;
Delarue 1974, 540–3; Verstraete 1989, 407; Micozzi 1998, 95–123; La Penna 2000,
141–56.
13 And again dust closes once and for all the life of Atalanta’s young son, when,
just before dying, he turns his last thoughts to his faraway mother and imagines her
desperately scanning the horizon, in the vain hope of detecting a sign of life from her
son, the dust stirred by his army (Theb. 9.895–7 ...frustra de colle Lycaei / anxia
prospectas, si quis per nubila longe / aut sonus aut nostro sublatus ab agmine puluis).
14 Vessey 1973, 299: “It is plain that he takes a boyish delight in the glamorous
accessories of war, and that he does not understand its real horror.”
15 Cf. for instance Theb. 4.246–55; 274 dulce rubens uiridique genas spectabilis
aeuo, 335–7 Exspecta, dum maior honos, dum firmius aeuum, / dum roseis uenit
umbra genis uultusque recedunt / ore mei ...
16 In a dramatic climax, uirtus, the supreme heroic value which subsumes the
puer’s own weaknesses, is labelled in fact as improba (Theb. 4.319), tenuissima
(6.551) and cruda (9.716), “wrong, excessive”, “of no count”, lastly “immature”. Cf.
also Theb. 4.318 furibunda cupido; Ripoll 1998, 321–2 alludes to a “conception