STATIUS, DOMITIAN AND ACKNOWLEDGING PATERNITY 183
Flavians; but it also finds a precise correspondence in the literary
field, and in particular in epic poetry.^23
Besides political power, there also exists a ‘literary power’, to-
gether with the forms by means of which it is wielded: this is con-
firmed by a metaphor like that of regnare, which leads, for example,
Statius himself to define Pindar as regnator lyricae cohortis “ruler of
the lyric band” (Stat. Silv. 4.7.5), and Quintilian to state that Cicero ab
hominibus aetatis suae regnare in iudiciis dictus est “his contemporar-
ies said that Cicero was king of the courts” (Inst. 10.1.112). Further-
more, also the term auctor possesses a specifically political meaning
(there is no need to recall that it comes from the same root as Augus-
tus, and that auctoritas is one of the cardinal values of Roman cul-
ture), and this is clearly not effaced in the use of the term in a literary
sense, to indicate the auctores that a writer considers as his ‘authori-
ties’, by whom he expects to be legitimated as their heir and successor
in their sphere of competence. Literary power too, as well as political
power, is transmitted and inherited; the idea of succession within a
homogeneous typological series, as a literary genre, is mirrored in
formulations such as, e.g., the one where Ovid draws the sequence of
the Latin elegists (Tr. 4.10.53f. successor fuit hic [scil. Tibullus] tibi,
Galle, Propertius illi; / quartus ab his serie temporis ipse fui), and
perpetuated by the scholastic practice of the canons.
Succession to the most prestigious literary throne, that of epic po-
etry, is a problem that runs through Latin culture of the imperial age:
writing epic after Virgil means competing with the Aeneid; but, in
contrast with the beliefs of a long, deeply-rooted critical tradition, this
confrontation is by no means a supine acquiescence: it is also a prob-
lematic and critical one, and undoubtedly it is hardly disinterested.
After the ‘murder of the father’ Virgil at the hands of Lucan (who, in
order to achieve his aim, had ‘gigantified’ him, presenting himself as
an antagonist on a level with him), the strategy adopted by the Flavi-
ans is basically not very different, even if it may seem to be the oppo-
site: deifying Virgil means also turning him into a museum piece:
making an unattainable classic out of him means placing him at a dis-
tance, and thus in a certain sense, getting rid of him (in one’s own
interest, of course: because ‘following in his footsteps’ means minting
23 On the theme of poetic succession in ancient epic cf. esp. Hardie 1993, 101ff.