an issue that was in the air as never before.
It is intriguing, too, to find Statius, near the end of the century, concluding his epic Thebaid by insisting that his
work is far inferior to the immortal Aeneid. What Statius is doing is dramatizing his dilemma and at the same
time playing an elegant literary game by adapting a traditional motif to new circumstances. The theme of self-
deprecating homage to a great predecessor had been heard often-Horace, for example, with nicely calculated
humility contrasts himself with the torrential genius of Pindar-but never before in epic, where a pose of
confidence was expected. Statius, however, who begins his poem by asking what story he shall take for his
subject, concludes it on a note of self-doubt. More than ever, poetry has become reflective upon its own nature;
the Augustan self-consciousness has been given a new twist.
Manilius' Astronomica, begun in the last years of Augustus and continued under Tiberius, illustrates the
possibilities and the pitfalls. This is a didactic poem on the theory of astrology, conceived on a heroic scale.
Lucretius' De rerum natura is the obvious exemplar, and its influence is patent throughout. Like Lucretius,
Manilius speaks of struggling -with the intractability of his subject-matter; the difficulty of putting arithmetic
into verse is at once his problem and his delight.