Dealing with Ghosts: Literary Assertion in Statius' Thebaid

Abstract

Chthonic scenes have often been considered in terms of their metapoetic potential. The very nature of such episodes, in which protagonists typically encounter characters from the literary-mythological past, arguably encourages a kind of artistic self-consciousness. In Currie's words,Anekyiamay be an especially fitting place for a poem to explore self-reflectively its relationship to earlier poetry: to confront its own literary ghosts.This article examines whether the portrayal of ghosts in the necromancy of StatiusThebaidBook 4 can be read as a meditation on the poem's place in the literary tradition. It views the scene as a commentary on the epic's artistic practices, wherein Statius both acknowledges his predecessors, especially Ovid and Seneca, and asserts his own literary contribution through the appearance of the ambushers depicted earlier in the poem. It then argues that Statius validates his place in the canon by enacting the integration of the ambush scene into literary and Theban history.

Sulle orme dell'Iliade

“…Sui modelli ovidiani della monomachia di Tideo si vedano da ultimiKeith 2002a, pp. 389-92;Parkes 2010; Rebeggiani 2018, pp. 126-27.…”