Chapter XLVI: Book XII: opens with funeral honours for the Theban dead. A report of

Creon’s decree withholding burial from his fallen foes is brought to the wives of the six slain leaders on their way from Argos to recover the bodies of their dead. Except Argia, Polynices’s widow, all the women go to implore aid from Theseus, King of Athens. Argia, arriving outside Thebes, burns the body of her husband on Eteocles’s pyre, where there are signs to show that fratricidal hatred had survived death; she is met and helped by Antigone. The two are detected, haled before Creon, proudly own their act and are sentenced to death. Athens meanwhile consents to help the Argive war-widows. Very significantly the altar of mercy in Athens is described, as a symbolic contrast to the harshness of Creon at Thebes. The passage is remarkable for the colour it gave to the notion of after times that the poet was a Christian:

There stood an altar at the city’s heart
Reared to no God of Power: Mercy mild
Made it her shrine, and human misery
Had hallowed it. It never lacked for prayers
Renewed, nor e’er repelled a suppliant.
There whoso asks is heard, and day and night
The way is open, and the offering
The Holy One requireth is a cry.
The worship costs but little: incense-flame
And victim’s blood find no acceptance there.
That altar sweats with tears.[1399]

So the Athenians approach Thebes and win the victory, Creon dying at the hands of Theseus. The obsequies of the fallen and the _envoi_ (already translated) complete the work.

To appreciate an allusive epic like the _Thebaid_ the reader needs equipment in the myths of Thebes: he must know more than the story of Oedipus, the fated king, his house, and the “Seven Against Thebes”: he must remember the outlines of legends about Amphion, about Cadmus, son of Agenor, about Dirce, and he must be expert enough to grasp why Statius calls Thebes by varying epithets like “Aonian” (I. 34), “Echionian” (I. 169, II. 90), “Ogygian” (I. 173, 328, II. 85), or “Sidonian” (III. 656), and why Polynices is the “Ismenian hero” (I. 673), and why the Argives are _Inacha pubes_ (I. 619). The well-springs of all such mythological lore lay far back in the ancient Greek Cyclic story of Thebes; in the tragedies of Aeschylus, Sophocles and Euripides;[1400] and in Statius’s main source for material, Antimachus, who, before the days of the Alexandrian poets, but anticipating their erudition, composed a massive epic in his _Thebais_. He wrote rather for the leisured and the learned than for the ordinary reader. Alexandrian critics put him second among epic authors: and Hadrian is said to have preferred him to Homer. But he used his spacious limits unrestrained by any canons of unity. Not content to end the forbidding tale of fratricidal strife on the more human, more really tragic note of Antigone’s devotion to her slain brother, he involved himself in two additional sequels, the war with Athens and the revenge of Argos. Statius showed more wisdom in writing fewer books on the theme, in condensing the war with Athens, and in omitting the triumphant return during the next generation of the Argive avengers, the Epigoni. When he is criticized, as he deserves to be, for his digressions, it is fair to remember the almost overpowering literary legacy which he inherited. There are signs that he also consulted Seneca’s _Phoenissae_ and _Oedipus_; but in Latin his master was Virgil, although Ovid and Lucan[1401] also went to his making. Nor was Horace forgotten.[1402] The Virgilian influence is manifest both in his language and in the construction of his incidents. Sometimes actual phrases are copied as in _magnanimosque duces_ (_Th._ III. 65); _procumbunt piceae_ (_Th._ VI. 100, to remind readers, as if by a traditional phrase, that the whole passage is based on the felling of the wood in _Aen._ VI. 179 _sqq._); _pede pes_ (_Th._ VIII. 399, repeating the Ennian words borrowed by Furius of Antium as well as by Virgil, _Aen._ X. 361, and in structure going back to Homer himself). The _Siluae_ present the same features in phrases like _urbis opus_ (_Silv._ II. ii. 31) and _qualis eras!_ (II. vi. 34). Or, again, a different turn may be given to the original expression, as Virgil’s _Quis fallere possit amantem?_ becomes _nil transit amantes_ (_Th._ II. 335), or his _forsan et haec meminisse iuuabit_ is elaborated into

_forsan et has uenturus amor praemiserit iras_
_ut meminisse iuuet._ (_Th._ I. 472-473).

Elsewhere Statius gives us a blend of verbal and material reminiscence, as when he implores his father’s spirit to revisit and counsel him in dreams issuing from “the Gate of Horn” rather than from “The Ivory Gate” (_Silv._ V. iii. _sub fin._; _Aen._ VI., _sub fin._). His debt to Virgil for incident is also heavy—too heavy, in truth, for genuine originality. It was not merely that he took over through Virgil the convention of supernatural interferences, as also of copious decorative similes, and outdid all his predecessors in these: he went further and allowed his imitation to become too obsequious in a parallelism of incidents. Because Evander told the story of Hercules and Cacus in the _Aeneid_, we must, before the first book of the _Thebaid_ is completed, have Adrastus’s digressive tale about Coroebus’s resolve to rid his country of a punitive monster sent by Apollo; because there were funeral games in Virgil, we must have almost a whole book devoted to the rites and contests in memory of the child Archemorus; and because _Aeneid_ IX celebrated the bold night-raid by Nisus and Euryalus, we must have a corresponding pair, Hopleus and Dymas, in the tenth book of the _Thebaid_, intercepted during their quest for the bodies of Tydeus and Parthenopaeus.

The other epic effort by Statius was his _Achilleid_, cut short by death when little over 1100 lines were written. What dimensions this tale of Troy might have reached we can only guess: it certainly was to cover a wider field than a “Wrath of Achilles”; for the author, immediately after his invocation, declares that his design is to relate more than the _Iliad_ contains—not to end with the fate of Hector, as Homer did, but to escort the young hero throughout the Trojan war.[1403] This then, is a second laurel wreath which he asks Apollo to plait for him, inasmuch as he announces himself no stranger to the Muses but known for his poem on Thebes.[1404] True to his more extended view of Achilles’s life, Statius begins early in it with the fears of the hero’s mother Thetis that danger threatens her son from the elopement of Helen with Paris. So, with the purpose of transferring Achilles to a safe hiding-place, she visits the cave of the Centaur Chiron under Mount Pelion where the youth is being brought up. Her son is absent: Chiron tells his mother he has remarked a change in him:

Once he was wont to bear rebuke and hear
Commands with zeal, nor far desert the cave;
Now Ossa holds him not; nor Pelion’s
Towering mass, nor snows of Thessaly.

Just at that moment, radiant after an adventure on which he has killed a lioness, he returns,

Yet, spite of war and toilsome energy,
Comely to look upon: there floated o’er
Fair lineaments a rosy fire: his hair
Outshone the gleam of yellow gold, and time
Had not yet changed his earliest youthful down.
Eyes with a quiet flash were his, and you
Could see his mother written on his face.

She decides that he must be concealed in the island of Scyros, and a pleasant picture of mingled nature and fancy is given us of his half-miraculous transference thither. Achilles, sunk in the profound sleep that falls on the young (_qui pueris sopor_), is borne by his goddess-mother down to the quiet seashore (_iussa tacere litora_). The way lies clear in a moonlit world. Their escort, the Centaur, seeks to hide his moist eyes (_udaque celat lumina_), when suddenly a dolphin team hurries mother and son off across the waters, and he can with effort (_erecto prospectat equo!_) just see them pass from sight where the white foam lingers behind their course. Then gloom descends on Thessaly; for the heights of Pholoë lament the youth that will never return, and cloud-capt Othrys sighs, and the river Spercheos wastes with pining—a frigid sort of “pathetic fallacy” like the legendary sorrow of nature for Balder dead. It is a more natural touch to say that the cave where the old Centaur taught Achilles music is now mute, or even to fancy that the woodland Fauns miss his boyish melodies, but the grotesque is reached in the mourning of the nymphs for the lost opportunity of marrying Achilles! This and the too matter-of-fact reference to the Centaur on his hind legs (_erecto equo_) are among the not infrequent instances where mythology betrayed Statius into absurdity. Nearly all the rest of the existing fragment, which might borrow Mr. Robert Bridges’ title “Achilles in Scyros,” relates his reception in women’s attire at court there, his passion for one of the princesses, the detection of his disguise by Ulysses, and his departure for Troy.

The _Achilleid_ has much the same qualities as the _Thebaid_. There are still echoes of Virgil, mythological erudition, and ornamental similes. The subject, however, is a more attractive one than that of the _Thebaid_, and it is unfortunate that the incompleteness of the _Achilleid_ makes elaborate comparison between them nugatory.

Probably Statius and his contemporaries felt that his fame would be founded on his epic work, and it was for his _Thebaid_ that he was valued in the Middle Ages. In Dante he plays an elevated part, and is often quoted. Chaucer, who mentions him with enthusiasm several times, calls him “Stace of Thebes” in _The Knightes Tale_, and in the _Hous of Fame_, repeating Dante’s confusion[1405] of him with a rhetorician of Toulouse,

The Tholosan that highte Stace,
That bar of Thebes up the fame
Upon his shuldres, and the name
Also of cruel Achilles.

Here, then, as in _Troilus and Criseyde_, where he tells his “litel book” to go

And kis the steppes, whereas thou seest pace
Virgile, Ovyde, Omer, Lucan and Stace,

it is among the great narrative poets that Chaucer places Statius. His hold upon the Middle Ages[1406] is not altogether easy to explain. Was it the tradition that he became a Christian which threw a halo round him in the eyes of medieval Catholicism, and did that tradition in turn grow out of his worshipful attitude to Virgil and the tenderness of feeling which found one of its most remarkable expressions in his description of the Shrine of Mercy at Athens? Modern criticism, however, is not likely to forget that he was also the author of the miscellaneous _Siluae_, which after centuries of oblivion were restored to notice, when Poggio on his travels in 1417 or 1418 found them in a manuscript along with Manilius and Silius and had a copy made to be sent back to Italy.[1407]

The thirty-two poems in the five books of the miscellany entitled the _Siluae_ are mostly in hexameter verse, though there are four in hendecasyllables[1408] and one set each of Alcaics and Sapphics.[1409] The number of lines in each book is between 700 and 800. In the fifth book, the longest poem of all, 293 lines on the poet’s father, is in juxtaposition to the shortest, the 19 lines to Sleep. The variety of the poems is the outcome of their origin: they fit some passing event; pay a compliment to the emperor or a friend; describe a country house or work of art; frame an elegy on the poet’s father, a slave, a lion or a parrot; indite an invocation to Sleep; or celebrate the dead poet Lucan’s birthday. In other words, they are occasional verses, being, the author tells us in one of his five prefaces,[1410] rapidly composed, so that they illustrate Quintilian’s description of what is meant by a _silua_ in literature.[1411] Statius had long hesitated about issuing in collected form poems which were composed separately, but considered that the author of the _Thebaid_ might be pardoned for this venture, on the analogy of great poets who wrote light verses as Virgil did the _Culex_.[1412] All students of the archaeology and social history of the Flavian age have reason to applaud the poet’s decision to give them to the world; and as literature there is nothing quite like them in Latin. They are not to be judged as claiming high inspiration, but as pieces in which the recurrent artificiality is time after time illuminated by the play of a pretty fancy and the grace of clever expression. Nor is the artificiality wholly inconsistent with sincerity of feeling. A survey of the poems may illustrate their qualities.