N. has established herself as an influential voice in the criticism of Statius and is especially well known for her work on the Siluae, particularly Statius' Silvae and the Poetics of Empire (2002), a ‘Green and Yellow’ commentary on Book 2 of the Siluae (2011) in addition to a large body of articles on Statius' occasional poetry published between 1988 and 2012. The present volume, however, cuts across generic boundaries and is to be welcomed as a thought-provoking and wide-ranging assessment of Statius' poetic œuvre in its entirety, embracing the epics as well as the Siluae.
The introductory chapter serves to orientate the reader by outlining the book's methodological framework. By providing helpful historical and cultural contextualisation of Statius' work, this chapter is likely to be particularly useful to non-specialist readers approaching his poetry for the first time. Although explored most obviously in the book's final chapter, the central thesis of N.'s study is that ‘the poetry of Statius, an author whose identity mediated between the two significant cultural centres in Italy, Rome and Naples, brings an important bicultural vision to Flavian society and literature’ (p. 8). Here in her methodological chapter N. sketches a portrait of Statius which reflects the rehabilitation of his poetry in the last decade. Far from being the ‘mannerist’ poet of stylistic excess, Statius emerges as an innovative rather than a derivative poet engaged in a rich and complex intertextual dialogue with his literary predecessors and contemporaries. For N. all three of Statius' works stand together as a unified and cohesive body of poetry; this intratextual approach to reading Statius' poetry recurs throughout and is a major strength of the volume.
Chapter 2, ‘Misconceptions about Statius’, confronts and refutes a number of traditional assumptions and stereotypes surrounding the poet and his work. In particular, the idea of the Siluae being defined as the literature of leisure is confronted and challenged (pp. 16–20). N. teases out very well the complex concept of leisure (otium), as distinguished from luxury, against the backdrop of intellectual culture in the first century. The treatment of Domitian within Statius' work, while occupying a fairly small proportion of the poems (Silu. 1.1, 1.6, 2.5, 4.1–3, Theb. 1.17–35, 12.814, Achil. 1.14–19), has arguably attracted a disproportionate amount of critical attention. The bulk of this chapter (pp. 20–36) focuses on the rejection of the traditional view of Statius as a ‘court poet’ who enjoyed a close familiarity with the emperor. N. offers a balanced and nuanced assessment of the thorny problem of imperial panegyric, exploring the highly-wrought and figurative character of praise poetry which by its very nature ‘invites multiple levels of reception’ (p. 28). The chapter concludes with a useful section on Statius and his contemporaries. Here N. outlines the patterns of creative engagement between Statius and his Flavian contemporaries, particularly Martial (whose epigrams often overlap with the subject matter of the Siluae), Silius Italicus (where parallels can be detected between Statius' characterisation of Achilles in the Achilleid and Silius' presentation of Scipio in the Punica) and Valerius Flaccus (whose Lemnian episode in Arg. 2 is expanded in Statius' own epic at Theb. 5.48–498).
The third chapter is concerned with physical, metaphorical and textual boundaries, particularly in the epics. In an apparent return to N.'s earlier interpretation of imperial panegyric (Statius' Silvae and the Poetics of Empire [2002], pp. 46–73), the image of the limes is explored and used to interpret the proem to the Thebaid as an expression of anxiety ‘or a cautionary fear of an imperial disregard for setting and acknowledging boundaries to power’ (p. 50). As N. also shows, water and geographical spaces function as textual boundaries within Statius' epics, marking out transitional points within the poetic narrative; this approach is applied to the transgression of the Nemean spring (Theb. 4.804–5.16) and the river Asopus (Theb. 7.424–40), while geographical spaces form the backdrop to Achilles' education in the Achilleid (Chiron's cave, the island of Scyros and the open sea). For N. ecphrasis is itself another kind of textual boundary which ‘frames and bounds a work of art or architecture within a text’ (p. 13). But whereas N.'s earlier work had focused on ecphrasis in the Siluae, here the emphasis falls on the first ecphrasis in the Thebaid, the compact description of Adrastus' libation bowl (Theb. 1.543–51). N. provides an incisive analysis of the passage, setting it within the context of the literary traditions of ecphrasis and uncovering the proleptic function of the ecphrasis which can be read as foreshadowing themes to be developed later in Statius' narrative. More boldly, N. also seeks to connect the first ecphrasis of the Thebaid with the first of the Siluae through the motif of Medusa which decorates both Adrastus' libation bowl and Domitian's equestrian statue (described in Siluae 1.1).
The following two chapters – placed in pointed juxtaposition – both map out fascinating aspects of the medieval reception history of Statius' epics. The overarching theme of Chapter 4 is Roman educational theory and its strong connection with the construction of elite masculine identity. Read within the cultural context of the 90s when Quintilian published his Institutio Oratoriae and the Aeneid was a central school text, the complex characterisation of Achilles in the Achilleid, embodying aspects of both ‘male’ and ‘female’ identity, emerges as a reactionary response to contemporary ideology. N. goes on to show how both Thebaid and Achilleid had become key classroom texts by the twelfth century; yet the complexity and duality of Statius' Achilles is suppressed and neatly glossed over. Chapter 5, ‘The Double Grief of Jocasta’, takes its title from Dante (Purg. 22.55–6) who read the Thebaid as the greatest poem of lament. In stark contrast to the Aeneid which contains only one maternal lament (Euryalus' mother at 9.481–97), female lament is a prominent theme of the Thebaid. N. carefully analyses this theme, particularly the figures of Ide and Jocasta in Book 3, and effectively sets it in counterpoint to the Siluae where male mourning becomes the primary focus. The final section of Chapter 5 returns to medieval reception and identifies texts such as the eleventh-century Cambridge Songs, the Vita Aedwardi and Chaucer's Troilus and Criseyde which reflect the influence of Statius' treatment of the theme of female lament.
The final chapter, ‘Between Rome and Naples’, takes the form of a close reading of Siluae 3.5 which contains an encomium of Naples and Campania (3.5.72–107) and articulates the duality of the poet's own identity as both Neapolitan and Roman. N. excavates the poem's multiple layers of literary allusion, reading the poem as Statius' own laudes Campaniae, a poem which engages closely with Virgil's laudes Italiae and evokes Seneca's moralising discourse over villa ownership and withdrawal only to subvert it. A particularly interesting feature of N.'s analysis is her identification of possible allusions to epic, both to Statius' own epic (Theb. 3.678–95) and to Silius Italicus (8.207–41), a further layer of allusion which gives voice to the generic shift away from the world of epic towards the social world of the Siluae.
In keeping with the spirit of the Classical Literature and Society series in which it appears, this book will appeal to a wide range of audiences. There is much here to interest the scholar of Flavian poetry as well as those approaching the poetry of Statius for the first time.
