In the fifth poem of Siluae 1, Statius finds himself in the resplendent bathhouse of his patron, Claudius Etruscus.Footnote ¹ The poet of the Thebaid, lounging poolside, is adamantly off-duty. He rejects any invocation of inspired, epic and specifically Greek poetry (non Helicona graui pulsat chelys enthea plectro | nec lassata uoco totiens mihi numina, Musa, 1.5.1–2), and instead settles in for a night of ribald fun and light verse with his friend (dilecto uolo lasciuire sodali, 1.5.9).Footnote ² Statius then issues orders (1.5.10–11):

The request to a slave-boy to bring wine is typical of a sympotic setting.Footnote ³ But Statius additionally requests music, and asks the puer to ‘fire up the sluggish lyre’, taking chelys (which appears earlier in line 1) as the standard spelling for the transliterated Greek χέλυς, which means ‘tortoise’ or ‘lyre’, on account of Hermes’ invention of the lyre from a tortoiseshell (Hom. Hymn 4.39–54). Statius has already referenced the pun, commanding Mercury to silence the ‘melodious beast’ (tu quoque muta ferae, uolucer Tegeaee, sonorae | terga premas, 1.5.4–5). The paronomasia in line 11 is strengthened through incende (‘stir up, inflame, provoke’, OLD s.v. incendo), which applies both to the anticipated beginning of a lyric performance and to the proverbial sluggishness (cunctantem) of the tortoise.Footnote ⁴ However, the text is far from firm, and incende itself is in doubt: intende—an anonymous Renaissance conjecture in the Matritensis (M) manuscript—has been adopted in several editions, on the basis that intendere, by analogy with ἐντείνω, would mean ‘tune’.Footnote ⁵ Eden prefers intende to incende, on the grounds that ‘inflaming the lyre’ is what Statius ‘is going to do himself as he accompanies his song (canimus 12)’, and not the task he orders the boy to perform.Footnote ⁶

The collocation of cunctantemque … chelyn and the reference to the puer also links Statius’ invocation with Callimachus’ Hymn to Apollo, wherein the poet praises the chorus of young boys for accomplishing precisely what Statius now demands (Hymn 2.16):

Statius’ injunction bears a strong resemblance to that of Callimachus. But given the context of Callimachus’ Hymn—a choral performance by young boys on behalf of the city’s well-being in the presence of Apollo—Statius’ allusion seems appropriately antagonistic, with the poet having already demanded the departure of the god (et te, Phoebe, choris et te dimittimus, Euhan, 1.5.3), and having positioned himself within a sympotic context. Public performance is rejected in favour of private recitatio, and the boy is not Callimachus’ παῖς as holy chorister but a bathhouse slave.

chelys, however, warrants further attention. As commentators have noted, Statius is fond of chelys as the term for ‘lyre’, using it 27 times.Footnote ⁷ The use of chelys in extant Latin literature, however, is rare. Before Seneca, it is first attested in the Epistula Sapphus, attributed to Ovid, and only a handful of times thereafter.Footnote ⁸ The far more common Latin term is testudo, which, as a calque for chelys, can denote both tortoise and lyre.Footnote ⁹ Horace, for all his engagement with the diction and formulae of Greek lyric, opts for testudo over chelys (Carm. 1.32.14, 3.11.3). Indeed, when Politian’s commentary on Statius’ Siluae remarks upon Mercury’s fera sonora in line 4, testudo, not chelys, is the word that he uses as a gloss.Footnote ¹⁰

Statius’ unusual preference for the Greek chelys over the Latin testudo might thus reinforce the Hellenic identity that the Neapolitan native, son of a Greek grammaticus and poet, persistently highlights.Footnote ¹¹ This in turn adheres to a general pattern that emerges in the opening lines of 1.5, which provide an array of Grecisms precisely when Statius gestures towards the dismissal of all Greek forms of inspiration and modes of poetry.Footnote ¹²

Whatever the poet’s attraction to the word, Statius seems to be laying it on rather thick, presenting us with no less than three references to the chelys in the opening eleven lines. The context of the bathhouse of Claudius Etruscus, however, gives us good reason to exonerate him of redundancy. Statius’ deliberate and unusual preference for the Greek loanword over the more common Latin testudo also prompts the reader to consider the broader semantic range of the latter—including, specifically, the name for the structural device which covered basins above the furnace within a Roman bath system. The testudo, as this device is denoted, maintained the temperature of the water in the alueus, a convex receptacle with a flat bottom, apparently resembling the shape of a tortoise-shell; one end opened into the bath, and the flat base of the testudo was placed above the alueus.Footnote ¹³ Vitruvius provides a description (De arch. 5.10.1):

The case for incende is thus considerably strengthened if read as a prosaic instruction to the puer to attend to the testudo, or to quite literally ‘heat the bath’ (incende chelyn), giving an already droll appropriation of the lofty Callimachean Hymn an extra, materialist quality. It is linguistically clever too, since, if the immediate unfamiliarity of a calque like testudo is typically clarified through the imported meaning of the original language, then here the Greek loanword chelys is instead defamiliarized, and granted the wider semantic range that the Latin testudo enjoys. In keeping with the opening recusatio, Statius implicitly rejects the Greek poetic chelys, and asks the bath-attendant to fire up the Roman testudo instead. More importantly, the joke is clarified through the material context which Statius’ poem sets out to evoke, drawing attention to the architectural space that he is about to praise through the Siluae’s innovative form of ekphrastic encomium; the associations with the bath and heat recur at lines 6–7 (regemque corusci | ignis adhuc fessum Siculaque incude rubentem) and 31–3 (ipsa manus tenuit Cytherea mariti | monstrauitque artes, neu uilis flamma caminos | ureret, ipsa faces uolucrum succendit Amorum), where references to Vulcan and Venus mythologize the space that Statius describes.

The playful ambiguities surrounding this bilingual tortoise illuminate key aspects of the Siluae. Statius demands of his readership a sensitivity to the possibilities of bilingual play that works in both directions: in contrast with the conventional logic of the lamentable egestas linguae of Latin (Lucr. 1.139), which expects Greek words to make good deficiencies in the Latin language, Statius, the native-speaking Greek, draws on the wider meanings of a Latin word to expand the semantic range of a Greek one.Footnote ¹⁴ The passage also reinforces the tendency of the Siluae to recontextualize traditional literary gestures and markers within the material environs of his cultural context, marking a complex negotiation between different forms of cultural prestige—the poem and the artefact—which has tended to leave scholarship hamstrung between traditional poetic formalism and cultural materialism.Footnote ¹⁵ If we expect that Statius’ reference to the chelys is exclusively a poetic marker, we are invited to think more carefully about the material context of the poem. We are dealing with a wordplay that flits not only between languages but also between media. The material world of imperial Rome becomes a vehicle for Statius’ poetics, as Martelli and Hinds have argued, but also a means of articulating the culturally bilingual world of the poet, where the Greek encounters the imperial Roman at every crossroad.Footnote ¹⁶