188 GIANPIERO ROSATI
When Statius, in a proem so largely indebted to Lucan as a model,
also repeats the pattern of the alternative that awaits the future god
Domitian – only inverting the order: he may become either Apollo
(27–9) or Jupiter (29f.)^40 – he is clearly recalling the paradigm of
Phaethon, even if he does not explicitly mention it. In Statius, the one
who pays homage to the new god, and crowns him, is the Sun himself,
who is described as “the curber of the fire-footed horses” (ignipedum
frenator equorum), a definition which underlines his function as the
driver of the heavenly chariot, and is a clear case of borrowing from
the poem, Ovid’s Metamorphoses, which had narrated the disastrous
career of the horses entrusted to the inexperienced Phaethon (ignipe-
dum uires expertus equorum, 2.392).^41
A first observation can be made. The topical encomiastic motif
serus in caelum redeas (“don’t rush back to the sky”, 1.22ff.) is pre-
sented here in an unusual form: the exhortation addressed by the poet
to the future god, which in the encomiastic tradition is an invitation to
delay his ascent to the sky, and to prolong the benefit of his presence
on earth for the advantage of his subjects, runs the risk of assuming a
completely different meaning in the mythical framework created by
the Ovidian allusion. Exhorting the aspiring ‘new Sun’ to “remain
content with the governance of mankind” (hominum contentus ha-
benis) means inviting him to be moderate and to give up his divine
claims (being happy to wield absolute power on earth, and to donare
sidera to the others, that is to say, to deify his relations); it means re-
peating to him the warning that Phaethon’s father had given his
young, impulsive son in vain (2.50ff.), reminding him of his mortal
nature, and warning him not to nourish excessive ambitions (sors tua
mortalis, non est mortale quod optas, 2.56: this had been the warning
and 151). See also Fears 1977, 153ff., who insists on the importance of divine election
as a guarantee for the legitimacy of emperorship; this idea, which has a central pres-
ence in Pliny’s Panegyric, just around the end of the 1st century C.E. (not by chance,
that is with the first of the ‘adoptive emperors’) became “a major element in official
imperial ideology”.
39 A possible reference to Phaethon (as a figure of the young Octavian) has also
been suggested in the famous simile, at the end of Virgil’s Georgics book I (512–4),
of the world chariot wandering after Caesar’s murder: cfr. Lyne 1987, 140 n. 63. Cf.
also the competition piece for the ludi Capitolini of 94 C.E. by the boy Q. Sulpicius
Maximus (IGUR 3.1336) as interpreted by Nauta 2002a, 332–3.
40 Likely, according to Lebek 1976, 87, due to the different importance of the two
gods as models for Domitian.
41 These are the only two occurrences of the compound ignipes.