THE EQUINE CUCKOO 79
the speed with which he composed centum hos uersus, quos in ecum
maximum feci (“these hundred lines, which I wrote on the vast
horse”). The immense size of the rider and horse alike is his first
theme:
... superimposito moles geminata colosso
(Silv. 1.1.1)
this mass ... redoubled by the colossal figure placed upon itand it is one of his most insistent themes, indeed the most insistent
apart from the question of peace. The statue is so large, we are as-
sured, that it could only have come from heaven, or from the forges of
the Cyclopes, who are presumed to be exhausted from making it (las-
sum Steropen Brontenque, Silv. 1.1.4). Later it is spoken of more
firmly as the work of earthly craftsmen, but we are still told that it
must have taken the produce of all the mines of Temese to make it
(Silv. 1.1.42); the earth itself can barely support it, even though the
mighty base would be enough to hold up mountains or even Atlas as
he held the heavens on his shoulders (Silv. 1.1.56–60). Poetic hyper-
bole is indeed in play; that is obvious enough. But unless we agree
with Frederick Ahl that the poem is not a real panegyric at all, but
barely veiled mockery of Domitian,^20 then we must allow for the con-
si deration that a skilled panegyrist would know better than to give
such prominence to a theme if it were so far beyond credibility as to
invite immediate and unremitting ridicule. It may indeed have been
the case that the statue was ill-suited to its locale, that it overpowered
its surroundings, and that the visage of the emperor was not easily
20 Ahl 1984, 40–124. The work of those scholars who were inclined to suspect
irony and subversion in almost all encomium written for ‘bad’ emperors has had the
great merit of provoking more careful thought and analysis of this difficult, and to us
moderns almost alien, style of writing. The present paper, as will no doubt be obvious,
works on the assumption that the encomium is fundamentally sincere in the sense that
it is not intended to undermine itself to the point of meaning the opposite of what it
says on the surface or of mocking its subject; for all that, there may still be elements
of whimsy and humour in play to offset the solemnity of the occasion and the subject.
It certainly does not follow from this position that the poem should be seen as having
been simply written to order or as pure propaganda that slavishly reproduces the
emperor’s self-image. The poet, like the architect, is more fruitfully seen as collabo-
rating in the creation and expression of a harmonious and unified public image for the
emperor. For a judicious assimilation and evaluation of Ahl and the kind of argument
offered us by work in this vein see now Newlands 2002, 46–73, and for a direct refu-
tation of his arguments as they apply to Silv. 1.1 see Nauta 2002a, 422–6.