28 - Flavian epic

Summary

INTRODUCTORY

Each of the three epic writers of the Flavian era – Valerius Flaccus, Papinius Statius, Silius Italicus – sought to be Virgil's successor: a laudable but daring aspiration. Method and result differed widely. What is common to the epics is less important than what is distinct. This divergence is plainly revealed in their choice of subjects. Valerius selected the Argonautic myth, transmuting elements taken from Apollonius Rhodius in a Virgilian crucible: an audacious process for even the most skilful alchemist. Statius chose the war of the Seven against Thebes, a horrific saga of fraternal discord and moral dissolution but congenial to a poet steeped in the gloomy portentousness of Senecan tragedy and the spiritual nihilism of Lucan's Bellum civile. Silius rejected mythology, assuming the patriotic mantle of Ennius and Virgil: his was a national theme, the war waged by Hannibal and perfidious Carthage against the manifest destiny of the Roman people. The idea of composing a carmen togatum no doubt had a special appeal to one who had himself been a consul, provincial governor and statesman.

Within the context of European literature, only one of the three gained enduring eminence: Statius, whose Thebaid and inchoate Achilleid were highly valued and widely studied in late antiquity, in the Middle Ages and after. Dante, Boccaccio, Chaucer, Tasso, Spenser, Milton and Pope all bear witness to his stature. Valerius and Silius, by contrast, fell rapidly into neglect and oblivion; the Argonautica and Punica were not rediscovered until the Italian Renaissance and subsequently they provided pabulum for the nourishment of philologists rather than imitators.