viii PREFACE
of epigraphic quotation in the Silvae. She connects this with Statius’
strategy to transform and transcend the everyday reality of his pa-
trons’ world, and demonstrates how in various ways Statius replaces
an expected reference to an inscription by his own poetry.
Harm-Jan van Dam discusses the fortunes of the Silvae in the
Renaissance, concentrating on the reception and development of
silva(e) as a literary genre or mode of writing. He draws attention to
similarities between late 15th-century Italy and early 17th-century Hol-
land in the great enthusiasm for the Silvae evidenced by philological
work on the text, and by imitation and appropriation of the poems,
with Angelo Poliziano and Hugo Grotius as protagonists.
Michael Dewar argues that Statius’ poem on the colossal eques-
trian statue of Domitian in the Forum Romanum (Silvae 1.1) articu-
lates two themes crucial to the propagandistic message of the statue:
its association with other Flavian monuments in the vicinity and its
superiority to the monuments of Julius Caesar and Augustus in the
midst of which it was positioned.
Bruce Gibson examines various techniques of battle narrative in
epic poetry from Homer to Silius and points at Statius’ desire for
compression by foreshortening episodes and limiting the pictures of
individual combat, in comparison with Homer and Vergil. Gibson
argues that, following Lucan and Silius, Statius adds resonances of
historical modes of warfare in his similes, and uses anachronistic ele-
ments taken from historiography in his presentation of battle, in order
to amplify the significance of war in his epic on a mythical heroic
subject.
Peter Heslin investigates how Statius in the final books of the
Thebaid handles Greek tragedy. He argues that, by selecting and com-
bining themes and views from the tragedians, Statius reconciles the
plot(s) of Euripides with the spirit of Sophocles. By this use of themes
from tragedy, and by thematizing Athens, home of the tragedians, as a
refuge for the rest of Greece, Statius turns it into a paradigm for Rome
in more than one sense, and infuses the end of the Thebaid with moral
and political overtones.
Donald Hill analyses Oedipus’ prayer to Tisiphone and Jupiter’s
speech in the council of gods in Thebaid I. Oedipus’ prayer to wreak
vengeance on his sons is logically if not morally defensible, but Jupi-
ter’s diatribe about the failure of his previous punishments to improve
mankind is, Hill argues, rather a rambling speech by an incompetent