THE GUILT OF CADMUS THE FARMER IN STATIUS’ THEBAID

Abstract

Statius’ Thebaid inverts the traditional positive reading of agricultural work. In the account of the founding moments of Thebes, the poet remains faithful to what is documented in the extant Greek and Roman literary material. However, as this article argues, Statius introduces two significant innovations with respect to his thematic precedents. First, Cadmus the founder is explicitly and emphatically pointed out as guilty of the internecine struggle that results from his farming. Second, he does not limit himself to sowing the soil but, previously, he plows it. The ploughing motif, although pivotal in the myth of Jason's trials in Cholchis, only appears referred to Cadmus in Ovid's Metamorphoses (3.104–5), albeit in a very succinct form. As will be examined, Statius amplifies the Ovidian suggestion, programmatically conferring negative connotations to this motif (tillage, bull, yoke, furrow, etc.) throughout his epic. Cadmus’ ill-fated tillage is unambiguously presented as the origin of the curse of Thebes and as the root cause of the present fratricidal war between Eteocles and Polynices. The dire fruits which agricultural labour invariably produces in the Cadmean farmlands echo Lucanean Thessalian fields from whose furrows, contaminated by the blood of Roman combatants, grow polluted crops. The blame that Statius places on the shoulders of Cadmus the farmer, the relationship he establishes between farming and fratricidal war, and his insistence on the perverse effects of agricultural work transform mythic Thebes into an exemplar of fratricidal Rome as apt as Lucan's historical Thessaly.

INTRODUCTION

In Greece and Rome, agriculture represents the paradigmatic activity of the civilized man and of civilization as a whole.¹ Specifically, the yoke, the plough and the act of ploughing have a powerful symbolic charge and are favoured metaphors, not only for the human sexual act² but also for depicting ‘the growth of civilization and the establishment of order’³ on a physical, civic and political level. In Virgil's Georgics, a rather precise link between Roman identity and agricultural activity can be found, one which had already been widely documented by authors of the middle and late Republic. The poet's emphasis on the farmer's ability to impose order on nature is constant, his task being equated to that of the soldier and the statesman.⁴ It is also the case, however, that the ambiguities underlying the Virgilian farmer make the portrait of the countryman and his ‘sacred’ and virtuous ploughing activity susceptible to ambivalent interpretations. This leads to the paradox in the Georgics that whereas we find a farmer who is predominantly, although not exclusively, idealized, agricultural labour also functions (although in my opinion neither predominantly nor exclusively) as an allegory for the dark aspects of the ethics and politics of contemporary Rome,⁵ still convulsed by the memory of the recent civil wars.

With the exception of the incomplete Achilleid, landscape is ever-present in Statius’ compositions. The issue of dominating and domesticating the land is a central topic in the Silvae. The very soil, even when rebellious (3.1.110) or infertile (3.1.167), is ultimately subjugated through human ars. In his occasional poetry, Statius focusses primarily on exalting the aggrandisement of nature through architectural works and praising the magnificence and beauty of the gardens of the uillae,⁶ in the design of which Man emulates the noble activity of the farmer. Although agriculture is not of special attention in the Silvae, the poet makes it clear that farmland is a plenteous bosom (beato | … sinu, 2.6.67–8) that submits to the servitude of Man (nobile … | seruitium, 2.2.108–9). In Statius’ Thebaid, the landscape also plays an important role. It is an idyllic locus amoenus on which human action, contrary to what happens in the Silvae, has a perverse effect. Idealized landscapes are invariably disrupted,⁷ transformed into sites of death (loca dira, Theb. 1.162)⁸ and pollution⁹ due to the execrable and evil acts committed by human beings, whose acts find their echo in nature.

But this is not a paper about natural scenery in the Thebaid. My aim is to focus strictly on the farming activity depicted therein. From the late Republic to the end of the first century a.d., the problem of large estates had grown exponentially. Despite measures adopted by the Flavian emperors,¹⁰ in Statius’ times, the number of small agricultural landowners had decreased dramatically. Large tracts of cultivated land belonged to a small number of landowners and were worked by slaves or tenant farmers,¹¹ who were hardly fit to embody the Republican and Augustan farmer-soldier ideal. In short, in Flavian times there remained no trace in the Roman Empire of the economic structure that had allowed the idealization¹² of agricultural labour by the elite of the Republican and Augustan authors to sound even close to reality. Nevertheless, the stoic Musonius (flor. 56.19) continues to argue, we must suppose with sincerity, that the best way to live according to Nature is to cultivate the land, even if the farmer does not own the land he works. At the time when Musonius was writing, Pliny expresses nostalgia for the modest and vigorous yeomen of the past in whom Cato saw the potential for brave soldiers and good citizens (HN 18.26). As a rich landowner, Pliny's expressions of admiration for the simple life of the old and humble peasants cannot be understood as anything other than part of a harmlessly vacuous rhetoric on which he, like many previous and contemporary authors, builds ‘a fantasy of country picnics and lazy afternoons under shady trees’, as M. Beard ironically describes it.¹³

On the contrary, Statius rejects these exalted visions of agricultural work in the Thebaid. He presents the sinister side of farming and, for the first time in Greek and Roman literature, Cadmus’ ploughing in particular is loaded with negative implications. In this paper, I hope to show why the Flavian poet does so and how he achieves it. In the first section, I will analyse passages where, without mentioning Cadmus’ agricultural labour, gods and men coincide in signalling the guilt of Agenor's son. In the second section, I will explore the reasons why Cadmus is occupied with the act of tillage in Statius’ Thebaid when, in all extant Greek literary and mythographic material, he limits himself to sowing the teeth of Mars’ dragon. In this respect, I will examine Statius’ expansion of the interesting admixture of Colchian and Theban myths made by Ovid in the Metamorphoses, where Cadmus, appropriating the personality of the Colchian Aeetes and the Thessalian Jason, ploughs the soil. In fact, as I will show, Statius, with greater force than Ovid in his account of the foundational moments of Thebes (Met. 3.1–130), confers a key role on the bull and the yoke, prototypical images of the Colchian myth; through rewriting certain passages from Virgil and Lucan, the poet uses this imagery metaphorically to anticipate the fratricidal warfare of Eteocles and Polynices.

In the two remaining sections of the article, I will discuss the passages of the Thebaid in which Cadmus’ agricultural work is mentioned. First, I will address the fact that, on the first occasion when Statius refers to Cadmus’ ploughing (Theb. 1.7–8), he does so with a diction that interweaves the act of tillage, the foundation of a city and the mythic and historical fratricidal wars. Second, in the fourth and final section of the article, I will analyse the rest of the passages in which Cadmus’ agricultural labour appears. In all of these, it is patent that such work is execrable. Cadmus’ guilt, as I hope to show, is a Statian innovation. The Theban founder's ploughing is ill-omened and will inaugurate the inveterate curse of Thebes, and will also be the reason why the polluted Theban ground, as if it were the Thessalian fields described by Lucan, is forever condemned to yield horrendous fruits. In the Thebaid, the ploughing motif, already stripped of Virgilian ambiguities, is unequivocally nefarious.

DIVINE AND HUMAN CHARGES AGAINST CADMUS

Even on those occasions when Cadmus’ agricultural work is not explicitly mentioned, the characters of the Thebaid without exception pass condemnatory judgements on the founder of Thebes. Jupiter himself blames Cadmus in the first divine assembly. As a justification for his intention to punish the Theban people, the father of the gods adduces the criminal past of this deadly race (gentemque profanam, 1.232; exitiale genus, 1.243), predestined to evil.¹⁴ Jupiter enumerates those crimes which are worthy of his punishment: the funera Cadmi (1.227), the death of Pentheus at the hands of his mother Agave (1.229–30; see also 3.189–90), Oedipus’ incest (1.233–5), and the ungodly behaviour of Eteocles and Polynices towards their disabled father (1.238–9). Faithful to the chronology of events, the god mentions first the funera Cadmi which, in my opinion, refers to the death of the Earthborn who were sown by Cadmus.¹⁵ Numerous scholars, though, opt for a more neutral interpretation. Thus, Heuvel attributes to this expression the broad meaning of corpora necata, an allusion to all the deaths that occurred in the fateful Theban family,¹⁶ and Conrau-Lewis suggests that the phrase ‘encapsulates allusion to the series of tragedies that they suffered’.¹⁷ Although Statius borrows Lucan's diction literally when the latter mentions the death of the metamorphosed Cadmus (uersi … funera Cadmi, 3.189), no scholar believes that funera Cadmi refers to Cadmus’ death as an expiation for having killed the serpent of Mars. They claim that this atonement did not consist of the death of Cadmus but rather of his metamorphosis and that of his wife Harmonia into serpents (Ov. Met. 4.586–603). But perhaps more questionable is their opinion that funera Cadmi cannot refer to the bloodshed caused by the founder of Thebes in sowing the seed of the bloody Earthborn warriors, given that in Ovid's narrative of this mythic episode (Met. 3.26–130) there is no suggestion that any guilt is attached to Cadmus. Hence, they argue, the Statian Jupiter could not have referred to Cadmus’ ploughing as a reason for punishing the Theban people. As we will see, it is indeed true that Ovid placed great emphasis on the reluctance of Cadmus towards violence (Met. 3.104–25).¹⁸ Yet when we are dealing with Statius, a master of the art of variation and textual interweaving, it does not seem advisable to adopt the rationalized view of the ancient mythographers. On this point, Statius' version differs from Ovid's in that his Cadmus is seen as the perpetrator of an execrable act. It is for this reason that the priest Amphiaraus advises Capaneus that, with the fratricidal war of Eteocles and Polynices, blood will again stain the meadows of the dire Cadmus (diri … noualia Cadmi, 3.645).

Tydeus also adduces the culpability of Cadmus. He attributes Eteocles’ impiety not only to the direct inheritance of his incestuous father Oedipus but to that of the first ‘author of his blood’ as well: sic primus sanguinis auctor | incestique patrum thalami, 2.463–4. The expression sanguinis auctor and its variants (generis auctor, originis auctor, stirpis auctor, etc.) are very common in epic,¹⁹ and as such suffer from a lack of specificity. Thus there is no scholarly consensus here as to whom primus auctor refers. Lactantius ad loc. believes that it is Oedipus, whereas Mulder²⁰ argues that Tydeus alludes to Agenor, the cruel father of Cadmus who had prohibited his son from returning to Phoenicia if he could not find his sister Europa. Gervais²¹ suggests that the deliberate ambiguity of the poet allows the reader to note the allusion to the malevolent Jupiter who, in Book 1, used the expression sanguinis auctor (1.224) to declare himself progenitor of the two cities, Thebes and Argos, whose destruction he had decreed. Although it is possible that the elliptical reference noted by Gervais does exist, I find no strong objection to the claim that primus auctor refers to Cadmus, given that the title of founder of the lineage legitimately corresponds to him. In fact, when King Adrastus asks Polynices what family he is from, the latter answers obliquely: Cadmus origo patrum, tellus Mauortia Thebe, | est genetrix Iocasta mihi (1.680–1).²²

WHY DOES CADMUS PLOUGH IN THE THEBAID?

Although present in numerous epic similes, metaphors and ecphrases, agricultural work is never the primary focus of a heroic epic poem.²³ The ordinary activity of farming is not the kind of task that a hero is expected to perform, the three conspicuous exceptions being the Theban Cadmus, the Colchian Aeetes and the Thessalian Jason. Both in the Greek mythic version that attributes the founding of Thebes to Cadmus (considered by Berman to be more recent than the one attributing it to Amphion and Zethos)²⁴ and in the Greek Argonaut myth, the motif of agricultural work is found and involves sowing the crop of the Gegeneis (‘Earthborn’) who emerge fully armed from Mother Earth and immediately enter into mutual combat. Whereas in Greek mythology both the Colchian Earthborn warriors and the Theban ones appear to represent warlike strength,²⁵ strictly speaking, the two myths do not belong to the same mythic category; the former reflects a ritual of royal legitimation,²⁶ whereas the latter is certainly a foundation myth. From very early times, attempts were made to explain the repetition of the same episode in the two legends. Pherecydes had established the connection between them by affirming that, once Cadmus killed the serpent sacred to Ares, it was Ares and Athena who pulled the dragon's teeth from its jaws. The goddess gave half to Cadmus and the other half to Aeetes, so that each could do their own sowing in Thebes and Colchis, respectively (FGrHist 3 F 22a = Σ Ap. Rhod. 3.1179). Although diverging in terms of the number of teeth given to each of them, subsequent authors, such Apollonius (3.1177–80) and Ps.-Apollodorus (1.128–9), link the two myths in the same terms as Pherecydes had done.

However, while the Colchian Spartoi are the result of the ploughing and sowing undertaken by Aeetes and, afterwards, by Jason,²⁷ with the sole exception of a passage in Euripides’ Phoenician Women where βαθυσπόρους (‘deep sown’, 669) might be said to allude, albeit in an unspecific way, to Cadmus’ work of tillage, in ancient Greek literature the founder of Thebes sows but never ploughs. Only in one late Greek author, Nonnus, does he plough furrows from which battles emerge (χαροπῆς ἀρόσας πολεμητόκον αὔλακα γαίης, Dion. 4.425). In Roman literature, Cadmus performs the specific labour of tilling the land only in Ovid (paret et, ut presso sulcum patefecit aratro, | spargit humi iussos, mortalia semina, dentes, Met. 3.104–5), Hyginus (dentesque eius Minerua monstrante sparsit et arauit, Fab. 178) and Statius (Theb. 1.8, 3.180–1, 4.435–7 and 11.490).

The presence of the ploughing motif in the myth of the Argonauts has a high degree of thematic motivation, since Aeetes and Jason's feat of yoking the two fire-breathing bulls is a pivotal episode in the Thessalian myth. As far as the Theban myth is concerned, it is not possible to be certain whether the explicit mention of the tillage performed by Cadmus already existed in Greek literature or was a Roman innovation. Apart from the aforementioned connection established by Pherecydes between the Theban and the Colchian agricultural work, Apollonius’ Colchian story already had an evident Theban colouring.²⁸ Regarding Roman literature, as I have just noted, it is in Ovid's Metamorphoses where it is first documented that Cadmus, emulating Jason,²⁹ ploughs, and indeed it is possible that Ovid was the first to introduce this motif to the Theban myth.³⁰ Whether or not this is the case, Ovid, in a more explicit way than Apollonius, establishes a close link between the two myths, as demonstrated by the existing parallels between his narration of Cadmus’ tillage and its consequences (Met. 3.104–25), and his story of Jason's ploughing and of the birth and fight of the Colchian Terrigenae (Met. 7.121–42).³¹ Hence, Statius, faithful to Ovid, describes the agricultural work of Cadmus (Theb. 1.7–8) ‘through the Argonautic filter’³² and, consequently, Cadmus ploughs in the Thebaid.

The presentation of Cadmus as a ploughman in Ovid's Metamorphoses is in perfect consonance with the centrality that the poet confers on the bull and the yoke³³ (ploughs, furrows, etc.) in his account of the primeval times of the Theban house. Statius also strengthens the presence of these distinctive imageries of the Colchian myth in the Thebaid. In fact, the first simile of the Thebaid equates Eteocles and Polynices, the fratricidal sons of Oedipus, with two bullocks that resist being hitched by the peasant to the same yoke and pull in opposite directions (1.131–6) in such a way that uario confundunt limite sulcos (136).³⁴ Significantly, this simile inverts what Homer uses to bring into relief the unwavering friendship between Oilean Ajax and Telamonian Ajax (Il. 13.701–8).³⁵

Comparisons and similes of rival bulls are frequent in the Thebaid. However, such comparisons, in my opinion, preserve the heroic connotations that they most frequently carry in the epic genre, except when the primum comparandum is Eteocles or Polynices (or both).³⁶ The Theban Bacchante predicts that Oedipus’ sons will be two bulls of the same bloodline who will fight fiercely for supremacy: similes uideo concurrere tauros: | idem ambobus honos unusque ab origine sanguis, 4.397–8. On this occasion, Statius transforms into a proleptic metaphor the bull comparison that Virgil uses in narrating the singular combat of Aeneas and Turnus (12.715–22) which, according to broad scholarly consensus, has civil and fratricidal overtones.³⁷ Even earlier than this, in Book 2, during his exile at the court of King Adrastus, Polynices was compared to an exiled bull which, having recovered the strength of his hooves and horns, smashes oak trees with his breast and is ready to recapture his stolen meadows and herds (vv. 323–9).³⁸ And in Book 11, shortly before the fratricidal combat takes place, Eteocles is described as a bull hitherto untroubled by the exile of his adversary but who now, with the latter's return now imminent, trains himself by ripping up turf with his hooves and slashing the air with his horns (11.251–6). Given that the debt of Theb. 2.323–9 and 11.251–6 to the verses of the Georgics in which Virgil depicts a defeated bull regaining its vigour during its exile (3.229–36), and to Lucan's rewriting of Virgil (2.601–7), is well-known, I will limit myself to pointing out that these last two passages allude to historical civil wars in Rome.³⁹

Thus, the images of the yoke and the bull invariably have negative and fratricidal connotations in the Thebaid when applied to members of the Theban house. In what follows I will show how Statius uses Cadmus’ tillage to present the other side of the traditionally positive image of agricultural activity and of the act of founding a city, and that, in contrast to Ovid, he does so by programmatically condemning the founder of Thebes.

CADMUS THE FOUNDER ‘PLOUGHS WARS’

The Thebaid opens emphatically with the interweaving of tillage, foundation ritual and fratricidal war. In the proem, Cadmus is not a mere sower who trembles at a hidden war (trepidum si Martis operti | agricolam, 1.7–8); rather, he is the farmer who ‘ploughs combats’ in the furrows (agricolam infandis condentem proelia sulcis, 1.8).⁴⁰ If we accept Heuvel's interpretation, Martis operti is a genitive that depends on trepidum, not on agricolam; hence, the literal translation would be ‘the farmer scared at a hidden Mars’.⁴¹ All literary precedents agree in pointing out the fear of the son of Agenor at the birth of the Gegeneis. But the Statian Cadmus feels dread and knows that something infandum must be born when the fruit of his nefarious tillage is still hidden from him (Martis operti). Apart from the interesting proleptic value of trepidum, which at the very least shows a Cadmus who is well versed in his own mythical history, this is an example of the Statian narrative technique that Micozzi calls ‘memoria diffusa’,⁴² which the poet uses when he wishes to highlight some aspect that is crucial to the content of his epic. On such occasions, the poet resorts to the repetition of the same topic in various parts of his epic, while seeking different effects and introducing variations on the version of the literary models used in those other passages in which the same motif appears. In the present case, the sense of fear that the Theban farmer has towards the nefarious fruit that emerges from the earth will reappear in subsequent passages where Statius presents the relentless return of the agricultural labour of the founder of Thebes.⁴³

But, in addition, condentem proelia (1.8) offers a wording that is as ingenious as it is full of significance. It is a iunctura undocumented elsewhere in Latin literature, whereas the metaphor of the sowing (serere) of battles is commonplace.⁴⁴ Statius, with this extraordinary diction, plays on the polysemy of the verb condere. In the proem Cadmus is not only a farmer; he is, first and foremost, an ἀρχηγέτης (‘a founder’), and Statius makes sure that his acts fit this status perfectly. In his foundational act of ploughing, he does not limit himself to furrowing battles; he has to ‘found’ them.⁴⁵ With this phrase, the reader perceives, from the very outset of the epic, the oblique historical bias of the Statian narrative. Clearly, as Markus notes,⁴⁶ it is easy to perceive the association of condentem proelia with the words that Virgil uses to anticipate the founding of Lavinium and Roma (dum conderet urbem, Aen. 1.5)⁴⁷ and to describe Aeneas thrusting his weapon deep into Turnus’ breast (ferrum aduerso sub pectore condit, 12.950).⁴⁸ Statius employs simultaneously the two meanings that condere has in these two Virgilian verses to evoke the coexistence of the ideas of foundation and destruction. Additionally, these Theban furrows recall (and reverse) the Roman mythic-historic foundation rite—fully carried out by Romulus—that involved a plough and a team of oxen tracing the furrows that marked the sacred limits of the city on which the walls would subsequently be built.⁴⁹ According to the testimony of Cicero, only after this agricultural labour had been carried out could Romulus diuturnam rem publicam serere (Rep. 2.5).

It can be affirmed, then, that from the very beginning of the Thebaid, Statius presents the founding of Thebes as an inversion of the Virgilian foundation myth of Rome, acquiescing thus to the dark interpretation of the Aeneid that Ovid proposes in his ‘Thebaid’ (2.836–4.603).⁵⁰ However, we find here a notable difference between Ovid's and Statius’ versions of Cadmus the founder, since although in the Metamorphoses he carries out tillage that produces a murderous fruit, and although the story of Ovid's Theban royal house is a succession of family disasters, Cadmus’ founding ritual is correct. The unyoked cow, whose hoofprints he follows under the orders of Apollo (3.10–23), and his act of killing Mars’ dragon (Met. 3.59–95), are images ‘of the wilderness Cadmus is to civilize through city foundation’.⁵¹ This does not seem to be the case with the Statian Cadmus.

CADMUS’ PLOUGHING AS A CURSE

As was already the case in Greek tragedy and in Roman literature, in Statius’ narrative Thebes is an ill-fated city, and familial determinism functions forcefully here.⁵² The Cadmean ‘aetiologically-minded people’⁵³ openly recognize the eternal return of the past and the historical continuity of their abominations.⁵⁴ Yet, in the Thebaid, it is precisely in the sinister role played by Cadmus the farmer in shaping the motif of the returning past and of the congenital guilt that we find a significant innovation by Statius with respect to Greek literature, and also with respect to his Roman predecessors. In the Greek sources, no character attributes the present evils of Thebes to Cadmus’ agricultural work. The causes given by the Greek tragedians for the curse of Thebes are either the rancour felt by Ares towards Cadmus for having killed the serpent consecrated to the former, the monstrous origins of the Theban people, born of the dragon's teeth, Laius’ disobedience to the oracle of Apollo, who had forbidden him to have children, Oedipus’ incest, or his curse upon his sons.⁵⁵ As I noted above, in Ovid's Metamorphoses Cadmus is also not responsible for the fratricidal (cadunt subiti per mutua uulnera fratres, 3.123) and civil war (nec te ciuilibus insere bellis, 3.117) that erupts between the Earthborn warriors after his farming labour.⁵⁶ Contrary to Pherecydes (FGrHist 3 F 22a; see also Nonn. Dion. 4.456–63), who attributes the fratricidal massacre of the Earthborn crop to the fact that Cadmus (though driven not by bellicosity but by his terror at their birth) threw stones at them,⁵⁷ the Ovidian founder of Thebes in no way provokes their mutual carnage. According to the Euripidean version (Phoen. 931–9, 1006–18, 1062–6), he is only guilty of having killed Mars’ serpent. Yet Ovid absolves him of blame. The poet presents his act as an involuntary sin or error, given that Cadmus is unaware that the dragon is sacred to Mars, something which, although known to the reader from as early as Met. 3.32 (Martius anguis), the Ovidian Cadmus only comes to suspect much later on, in the moments prior to his metamorphosis (Met. 4.571–3). Nevertheless, Cadmus’ unintentional impiety will condemn all the members of the Theban family to suffer for his crime, since the vengeful and cruel gods will wreak expiation on all his children (Met. 4.564–70).⁵⁸

Neither Seneca nor Lucan blame Cadmus for the curse that the Theban people suffer. Seneca does not even mention that the birth of the Terrigenae was the result of Cadmus’ sowing (aut feta tellus impio partu | effudit arma, Oed. 781–2; see also 586–9), a fact that Lucan does succinctly point out (sic semine Cadmi | emicuit Dircaea cohors, 4.549–50). Conversely, Statius substantiates Cadmus’ crime and, in contrast to the literary precedents, invariably associates it with his labour of tillage. He is indeed guilty of having ploughed the fratricidal Earthborn Men. From Cadmus’ ill-fated agricultural labour (omen, Theb. 1.180 and augurium, 1.185), the birth of new monstrous and intrafamilial conflicts will be repeated inexorably over the course of the history of the city, culminating in the fratricidal struggle of Oedipus’ sons. This is what the anonymous critic suspects when he directs stern words at Eteocles to censor him for the fact that, owing to the agreement with his brother Polynices, the Theban people must tolerate a change of king each year. He asks whether Cadmus’ planting of the dragon's teeth may have turned out to be ominous for all posterity (Theb. 1.180–5):⁵⁹

an inde uetus Thebis extenditur omen,

ex quo … Cadmus

exsul Hyanteos inuenit regna per agros,

fraternasque acies fetae telluris hiatu

augurium seros dimisit ad usque nepotes?

This rhetorical question is also raised in Book 3. After Tydeus’ unsuccessful ambassadorship for peace in Thebes, King Eteocles ambushes him, but he emerges unscathed after killing all but one of the Theban soldiers. The city, in mourning, suffers so much unnecessary death that the citizen Aletes complains to the King, listing all the occasions on which tragedy has rained down on Thebes. Specifically, he claims that the city has borne misfortune often since Cadmus sowed the Aonian furrows (sulcos, Theb. 3.179–83):

saepe quidem infelix uarioque exercita ludo

fatorum gens nostra fuit, Sidonius ex quo

hospes in Aonios iecit sata ferrea sulcos,

unde noui fetus et formidata colonis

arua suis.

As already occurred at Theb. 1.7–8,⁶⁰ and will occur once again in the passage that I analyse below (fugit incepto tremibundus ab aruo | agricola insanique domum rediere iuuenci, 4.441–2), the fear of the countryfolk is mentioned in these verses (182–3). As we know, the fear and flight of farmers, pastors and indeed animals at the imminence of a prodigy or a supernatural or fateful event, as well as the monstrous fruits that arise from a soil contaminated by spilt blood, were pre-existing motifs in Greek and Roman literature.⁶¹ Virgil brings up this nefarious agricultural topic precisely when he alludes to the civil battles of Pharsalia and Philippi (G. 1.491–7). Horace equates the pollution of the fields caused by the blood spilt in these two battles and in the battle of Actium (Carm. 2.1.29–31) with the pollution of the soil of Rome after the fratricide of Romulus, a fateful omen for posterity (Epod. 7.17–20). Also in Petronius’ Bellum ciuile, the farmland that witnessed the civil confrontation of Marius and Sulla produces cursed fruits fertilized with blood (120.1.98–9). But it is Lucan who intensifies the tone and who uses the topic profusely throughout his epic, and more specifically in the passage in which he imprecates the Thessalian-Emathian lands for being the scene of the current civil confrontation of Pharsalia and of the future battle of Philippi (7.847–72). Terrified pastors and farmers, he asserts, will avoid these pastures contaminated by the bones and blood of Roman combatants and will flee from these fields in which polluted crops grow in the furrows (7.851–65).

The imprint of Lucan's poetic voice is once more evident in Book 4 of the Thebaid. The doomed agricultural labour and Cadmus’ ploughing are again evoked, but in a more sinister way. Eteocles, trembling at the portents that announce a sad end to the war, urges Tiresias that Lethe's rites be carried out. The place in which the prophet prepares the nekyomanteia appears to be the land which was ploughed and sown of old by Cadmus (Theb. 4.434–42):

extra inmane patent, tellus Mauortia, campi;

fetus ager Cadmo. durus qui uomere primo

post consanguineas acies sulcosque nocentes

ausus humum uersare et putria sanguine prata

eruit: ingentes infelix terra tumultus

lucis adhuc medio solaque in nocte per umbras

expirat, nigri cum uana in proelia surgunt

terrigenae; fugit incepto tremibundus ab aruo

agricola insanique domum rediere iuuenci.

Once again, the work of the Theban farmer who turns over the earth with the plough, bringing to light clods of dirt soaked in putrid blood, cannot but evoke Lucan's gloomy plain of Pharsalia, turned into the tomb of the Roman people.⁶² The intertextuality of these verses is extensive and complex, and is not limited to verses 851–65 of Book 7 of Lucan. Statius also establishes a strong connection with other passages of the Bellum ciuile in which Lucan rebukes all those landscapes that have witnessed civil confrontations.⁶³ All these are guilty places,⁶⁴ condemned to bristle with ghosts.

In a manner consistent with Statius’ use of recurrent motifs in the Thebaid and, more specifically, in coherence with the pervasive presence of the inherited guilt in his epic, verses 440–1 anticipate the mortal duel which Eteocles and Polynices will fight in Book 11. The consanguineous war arising from the sulcosque nocentes (436) ploughed by Cadmus in the primordial times of Thebes will be replicated when the fight between Oedipus’ sons occurs.⁶⁵ In effect, the ground worked by Cadmus, the farmland sown by him, the bristling imagery of the Earthborn Men rising up and the fratricidal struggle of the Sown Men will all resound in the passage of the single combat of Oedipus’ sons: stat consanguineum campo scelus, unius ingens | bellum uteri (11.407–8).

The interpretation of verses 434–42 of Book 4 poses certain problems of textual criticism and has led to divided opinion among editors regarding punctuation. Hill inserts a comma after Cadmo (435): fetus ager Cadmo, durus qui uomere primo.⁶⁶ Thus, as Lactantius had already done, Hill understands that the stout farmer is indeed Cadmus. Such punctuation, and the resulting interpretation, is roundly criticized by Hall, who describes Hill's punctuation as ‘disastrous’. In Hall's opinion, if a comma is used after Cadmo, then Cadmus becomes the subject of the relative clause which follows and, consequently, this would suppose a chronological inversion of the events. We would be faced with a Cadmus who ploughed the fields ‘after his own sowing of the Spartoi!’.⁶⁷ Hence, Hall affirms that a full stop must follow Cadmus, given that the husbandman alluded has to be a farmer subsequent to Cadmus, one who will till the land in the future and who will return to provoke the battle of the old ghosts of the Earthborn crop. The interpretation arising from Hall's punctuation⁶⁸ makes good sense, in that such a future farmer would be the perfect counterpart of the future countrymen of Virgil (G. 1.491–7), Horace (Carm. 2.1.29–31), Lucan (7.851–65) and Statius himself (Theb. 3.182).

Even so, Berlincourt's suggestion⁶⁹ that the comma before durus should be respected is sound, given the fact that Cadmus might plough again, and also that the Spartoi might truly be born again, would be perfectly coherent with the world dominated by a historical continuity of the past as found in the Statian epic. That is, if we set aside the familiar propensity of scholars to ‘invoke the criterion of internal coherence’,⁷⁰ this passage would constitute a truly oneiric and surreal scene. The appearance of the ghostly shadow of Cadmus and of the black ghosts of the ancestral Earthborn would accentuate the magical atmosphere of necromantic ritual that Tiresias and his daughter Manto are about to perform. The fear felt by the ‘actual’ Cadmus the founder (trepidum … agricolam, 1.7–8) would remain in his spectre (tremibundus agricola, 4.441–2), which is on the point of provoking the chimerical rebirth and struggles of the Terrigenae (nigri cum uana in proelia surgunt | terrigenae, 4.41–2).

If this is indeed the case, then we are dealing with an anxiety dream that occurs while the dreamer is awake. It is fitting here to take into account the distinction that de Jong establishes between ‘frame’ or ‘extra-diegetic or distanced space’, that is, a location that features in thoughts, dreams, memories or reports, in contrast to the narrative space that she calls ‘setting’ or ‘intra-diegetic space’, that is to say, the location of the action itself.⁷¹ A good example of this chimerical place or frame can be found in a passage by Lucan. In Book 7 of Bellum ciuile, after the battle of Pharsalia, the infamous victors sleep and have frenzied dreams (somnique furentes, 7.764). Ghosts of the citizens who died at their hands, and with whom in many cases they had blood ties (hunc agitant totis fraterna cadauera somnis, | pectore in hoc pater est, 7.775–6), appear to them (umbra perempti | ciuis adest, 7.772–3). Caesar himself, during sleep, sees monstrous shapes, the Styx, the spirits of the dead and the Tartarus (7.783–5). This seems to be, to use de Jong's terminology, an extra-diegetic space, since Caesar and his soldiers are sleeping. However, Lucan sows doubts about this and raises the possibility that the rising of the ghosts from the Thessalian fields and lands might be real: ingemuisse putem campos, terramque nocentem | inspirasse animas, iniectumque aera totum | manibus, et superam Stygia formidine noctem (7.768–70). The thematic proximity to the verses of the Thebaid that we are considering here may be corroborated by the verbal echoes. When the Terrigenae rise up their ghostly battle (uana in proelia, Theb. 4.440), Statius says that ingentes infelix terra tumultus | … expirat (Theb. 4.438–40), words that closely mirror Lucan's diction: terramque nocentem | inspirasse animas (7.768–9).⁷²

Moreover, it would not be the only occasion in which the farmland produces a distressing and hallucinatory fantasy. After the decisive battle between the brothers is over, the victorious Theban people emerge from the city walls and believe that they see the ghosts of the dead combatants rising from the earth: attoniti nil comminus ire | mirantur fusasque putant adsurgere turmas (Theb. 12.13–14). Pollmann considers that the fact that the Thebans remain terrified even once the danger has disappeared proves their ‘irrational condition’.⁷³ Contrary to Pollmann, I believe that the Cadmean citizens, as befits an ‘aetiologically-minded people’,⁷⁴ are very conscious of the fateful consequences of Cadmus’ ploughing and thus know that they will always be condemned to suffer the torment, real or psychological, of fearing what the earth produces, whether it be terrible fruits or phantoms.

In light of the discussion above, I am inclined to argue that, as Berlincourt sustains, it is possible that what Tiresias and Manto see during the nekyomanteia (Theb. 4.434–42) is the ploughing done by the spectre of Cadmus and the phantasmagorical rebirth of the Earthborn. In either case, whether it is Cadmus himself or a subsequent countryman who carries out the agricultural work in this passage, the guilt of Cadmus the farmer and the emphasis on his sacrilegious agricultural work persist.

There is one final passage in which Cadmus’ tillage appears as a symbol of the curse of Thebes in that, once more, it is presented as the foreshadowing of the present war of Eteocles and Polynices. pietas, abandoned by men and gods, is pained by her impotence to prevent the imminent fratricidal confrontation between Oedipus’ sons. The fury Tisiphone is puzzled by Pietas’ sudden interest and reproaches her for having been absent on all other occasions when the Theban family was guilty (Theb. 11.487–92):

… ubi tunc, cum bella cieret

Bacchus et armatas furiarent orgia matres?

aut ubi segnis eras, dum Martius impia serpens

stagna bibit, dum Cadmus arat, dum uicta cadit Sphinx,

dum rogat Oedipoden genitor, dum lampade nostra

in thalamos Iocasta uenit?

Tisiphone's enumeration of the impious deeds perpetrated by the Theban family does not respect the chronology of events here. The oldest of these are, logically, the death of Ares’ serpent (v. 489) and Cadmus’ agricultural work which, in straightforward language, is described as tillage: Cadmus arat (v. 490).

CONCLUSION

Contrary to what I argue in this paper, Ripoll holds that it is not appropriate to overestimate the guilt of Cadmus the farmer in the Thebaid.⁷⁵ Undoubtedly, Cadmus’ agricultural work and its consequences, the fratricidal battle of the Earthborn warriors, are not the only events remote in time that serve as a means of developing the tragic notions of the returning past and of a hereditary curse in the composition. Apart from the crimes of the Theban house that Jupiter considers worthy of punishment (1.227–43),⁷⁶ Harmonia's ill-fated necklace, for example, is set in relation to her own metamorphosis, to the death of Semele and to the incestuous marriage of Oedipus and Jocasta (Theb. 2.289–95).⁷⁷ Equally, the Martius anguis killed by Cadmus (the verbal coincidence with Ov. Met. 3.32 cannot be unintended) claims Menoeceus as a scapegoat (Theb. 10.612–14),⁷⁸ because he is the last Earthborn, the last descendant (10.806–7) of the warlike gens Martia (Theb. 4.556).

Nevertheless, it is undeniably the case that the passages of the Thebaid analysed above show that, firstly, Cadmus’ guilt is a Statian innovation and, secondly, that wherever agricultural motifs appear in relation to members of the house of Thebes, such motifs (ploughing, seeds, bulls and yokes) have negative connotations ‘because of their association with Cadmus and the Spartoi’.⁷⁹ The ploughing work of Cadmus is explicitly characterized as the primeval omen that foreshadows the future evils of the Theban house⁸⁰ and, more specifically, of the fratricidal war between Eteocles and Polynices. As I have noted, Statian Cadmus usurps the personality of Jason and, like the Ovidian Cadmus, plows the land, although, in contrast to Ovid's Metamorphoses, it is Cadmus, through this act of ploughing and sowing, who is guilty of ‘founding’ (agricolam … condentem, 1.8) the curse of Thebes. Ovid is in fact the first author to establish an equivalence between the civil implications of the combat of the Colchian Sown Men and that of the Theban Earthborn: the fight of the Earthborn people sown by Jason (Ep. 6.35, 12.99–100 and Met. 7.141–2) is as civil and fratricidal as that of the Theban Spartoi (Met. 3.117 and 123). However, Statius, in making the most of the prototypical motif of the ghastly farmland, achieves a broader articulation of the likeness of the two mythic places (Thebes and Colchis) than Ovid had done.⁸¹ As has long been recognized in the scholarly literature, Lucan had already gone further than Ovid, and, in addition to equating the two myths, considers the mythic struggles of the Colchian Sown Men and of the Theban ones to be equally apt as a means of explicitly establishing the analogy between myth and history, between mythic struggles and Roman historical fratricidal and civil wars.⁸²

In reality, Lucan transfers Thebes and the tragic myths associated with the city from Boeotia to Thessaly,⁸³ the scene of the historic battle of Pharsalia but also the homeland of the other mythic cultivator of struggles, Jason. We might say, then, that Lucan's Thessaly is a landscape that has usurped Thebes as the prototypical site of fratricidal and civil war,⁸⁴ while, with the poet's emphasis on the dire fruits that will emerge from the earth, Thessaly acquires a strong Colchian flavour. Statius, for his part, restores to Thebes its inveterate nature as a cursed city but strengthens its curse by establishing the Cadmean farmlands (which Seneca's Oedipus still dared to describe as Boeotios | … agros uberis … soli, Phoen. 129–30) as a counterpart to the dire Thessalian-Colchian fields of Lucan.⁸⁵ Statius, by offering in his narrative a sinister undertone to the foundational act of a city and a systematic demystification of the civilizing role traditionally attributed to the agricultural labour, seems to suggest that Thebes is as appropriate an exemplar and setting to evoke the Roman civil wars as Lucan's Pharsalia and Philippi.