182 GIANPIERO ROSATI
vehicle for the passage of power from one emperor to another, thus
critically focusing attention on the problem of succession and the fam-
ily as the symbolic place and space within which the problems of
power and of the conflicts associated with it develop. It goes without
saying that the myth of Thebes offered an ideal framework, the most
obvious and symbolically transparent one, to reflect not only on the
drama of the civil war which had shaken Roman history from Sulla to
the year of the four emperors, but also on the deadly conflicts which,
in the specific environment of the family, had marked the Julio-
Claudian dynasty in the passage of power from one emperor to an-
other.
The Thebaid is a poem about genealogy, about posterity, and the
weight of tradition (the longa retro series, 1.7); and posterity is seen
as a repetition (the repetition of a series of horrors overshadows the
history of Thebes and its ruling family, like a condemnation, an ines-
capable curse). But the weight of tradition is felt, more than in any
other literary genre, in epic, both because at the beginning of every-
thing, and of literary tradition itself, there is an epic poet, Homer, and
as a result of the central position that is recognised for epic texts
within the cultural and educational structures of the ancient world.
Thus, writing epic poetry means, first of all, coming to grips with
tradition; and repetition is also the dominant characteristic of Flavian
epic, and of that of Statius himself, who appears to complain on vari-
ous occasions of this condemnation to repetition, his belatedness, his
‘secondariness’,^22 the condition to which he is condemned by coming
‘a fter the greats’, after Augustan epics.
The idea of a cumbersome past, by which the whole of the future is
conditioned, overshadows not only the family of Oedipus, but also
political life during the Flavian Age, as well as Flavian epic, and in
particular the poetic consciousness of Statius. Just as the problem of
succession, the transmission of the power of Oedipus to his sons, is
the mainspring of the tragedy of Thebes, in the same way (after pro-
foundly influencing the lengthy principate of Augustus, who was con-
tinually in search of a suitable successor), it deeply torments the
whole history of the Julio-Claudian dynasty and the passage to the
22 See esp. Hinds 1998, 91ff.