The transition from early modern Edo to modern Tokyo, from Edoites to Tokyoites, occurred in fits and starts. Some, including leaders of the young Meiji government, sought to remake the city into a showcase of modernity to win the respect of major powers of the Western world and protect their new nation’s sovereignty. A modern railroad and emperor and the capital itself were to be emblems of “civilization” and “progress.” So rose the Shinbashi railroad station, a renovated Imperial Palace, and Ginza Bricktown. Innovations such as the railway changed people’s notions of space and time, and experiences of travel and leisure. At the same time, Tokyo was remade only in bits and pieces, its Edo past leaving an imprint on life in the city and its pastiche of neighborhoods. Pockets of the “low city,” or Shitamachi, swelled with migrants and the urban poor, even as the government and industrialists tried to put a sheen on the government and commercial buildings in the city center. As the nineteenth century turned into the twentieth, the city of Tokyo was becoming not just a modern national capital but also an imperial capital: the home of the emperor and the nucleus of an expanding empire.

In contrast with the emphasis put on pietas and providentia by Flavian discourse, the Thebaid is the only Flavian poem that begins and ends without gods, much like Lucan’s Bellum Civile. However, Statius’ gods are described in Ovidian terms and use thought-provoking allusions to the Metamorphoses to challenge the readers’ poetic memory with distorted versions of their literary past. The ways in which Statius and his gods allude to and manipulate the Metamorphoses’ divine narratives, reworking Ovid’s coded use of celestial geographies, both mark a significant distance from Lucan’s epic universe and highlight the Roman significance of the Thebaid’s divine world. The gods’ attempts to legitimise their morally dubious actions by manipulating the readers’ understanding of the Metamorphoses not only shows the Thebaid’s sophisticated engagement with the former literary tradition but also exploits the traditional analogy between heavenly and Roman power to reflect on the Flavian emperors’ progressive sacralisation of the imperial institution and selective renegotiation of Augustan legacy in the tense religious atmosphere of post–civil-war Rome.