Intertextuality in Flavian Epic Poetry

Contemporary Approaches

Neil Coffee, Chris Forstall, Lavinia Galli Milic, Damien Nelis, Neil Coffee, Chris Forstall, Lavinia Galli Milić, Damien Nelis

• Editore: De Gruyter
• Anno: 2019
• ISBN:
  9783110599756
• Edizione: 1
• Argomento: Literature
• Categoria: Ancient & Classical Literary Criticism

This collection of essays reaffirms the central importance of adopting an intertextual approach to the study of Flavian epic poetry and shows, despite all that has been achieved, just how much still remains to be done on the topic. Most of the contributions are written by scholars who have already made major contributions to the field, and taken together they offer a set of state of the art contributions on individual topics, a general survey of trends in recent scholarship, and a vision of at least some of the paths work is likely to follow in the years ahead. In addition, there is a particular focus on recent developments in digital search techniques and the influence they are likely to have on all future work in the study of the fundamentally intertextual nature of Latin poetry and on the writing of literary history more generally.

Helen Lovatt

Meanwhile Back at the Ranch: Narrative Transition and Structural Intertextuality in Statius Thebaid 1

It is now necessary for me to use the rather hackneyed phrase ‘meanwhile, back at the ranch.’ The word ‘hackneyed’ here means ‘used by so many writers that by the time Lemony Snicket uses it, it is a tiresome cliché.’ ‘Meanwhile, back at the ranch’ is a phrase used to link what is going on in one part of the story to what is going on in another part of the story, and it has nothing to do with cows or horses or with any people who work in rural areas where ranches are, or even with ranch dressing, which is creamy and put on salads.

Lemony Snicket, The Reptile Room

1Introduction

Any story must have a beginning, a middle, an end, and a number of parts in between. There have been scholarly studies of beginnings and ends in Latin epic, and even some work on middles: but how do we study and understand the division of a story into parts (scenes) and the movements between those parts?20 “Narrative transition” is the movement between “scenes” in a longer narrative. It is a crucial part of the articulation of any narrative, and I was drawn to it by my work on the divine gaze as a transitional device in Greek and Latin epic.21 The study of narrative structures poses particular challenges for text searching as a methodology. Word matching can only reveal a small subset of possible intertextual connections. Structures are also an important feature of intertextuality:22 for instance, in Statius Thebaid 6 the order of events in the games mediates between the orders of events in Statius’ main models, Aeneid 5 and Iliad 23.23 However, particular words and formulae do mark moments of epic transition, for instance the beginnings and endings of speeches.24 This chapter proposes to investigate what we can learn from looking at the language of narrative transition, using as a case study Statius Thebaid 1 and its relationship with Virgil’s Aeneid.25

Thebaid 1 is a book with a wide variety of narrative structures and transitional devices: the narrative ranges from Thebes to Argos, from the underworld to Olympus, with gods and mortals moving between them.26 It contains the proem, exposition, speeches, a divine council, an inset story and a hymn.27 The story is told from a variety of points of view, focalised by Oedipus, Eteocles, Polynices and Adrastus, not to mention Jupiter, Juno, a Fury and Mercury. Transition and journeys are important themes of the book, in a way that foreshadows the importance of liminality throughout the epic.28 The book sets the tone for the whole poem. Other books might fruitfully form a similar starting point: in particular, books 7 and 8 spring to mind, especially with the climactic movement of Amphiaraus from earth to the underworld at the end of book 7 and the beginning of book 8. Thebaid 1 has crucial intertextual relationships with, among others, Aeneid 1 (council of the gods, storm, arrival at hospitable location) and Metamorphoses 1 (council of the gods, journey of Phaethon). For reasons of space, this paper will focus on the relationship between the Thebaid and the Aeneid.

I begin by outlining the major narrative episodes of Thebaid 1. The poem begins with a proem (1–45) in the voice of the narrator which surveys the myth of Thebes, and praises Domitian. The first major scene is set in Thebes where Oedipus curses his sons (46–88). His prayer is heard by a Fury in Tartarus, who journeys to Thebes (88–122) and inspires Polynices and Eteocles with hatred and madness (123–141). The description of their quarrel merges into a lament on the part of the narrator (142–164). Thebans, including Eteocles and an anonymous critic, react to their solution: sharing rule, one year at a time, exile for Polynices (164–196). A strong scene change, of place and narrative level, takes us now up to Olympus, where Jupiter calls a divine council (197–302). This ends when he sends Mercury to fetch Laius from the underworld to help start the war between Thebes and Argos (303–311). Mercury’s journey to Tartarus reverses that of the Fury, and contrasts with that of Polynices which comes next (312–377), which includes a storm both physical and psychological and ends with a simile. The next scene presents Polynices’ arrival at Argos, exposition of the situation in Argos, and his quarrel with Tydeus (377–427), also ending with a simile. There is then a change of focaliser to Adrastus, and the scene of the welcome he gives to them in Argos completes the book (428–720). Within this scene we find the inset story of Coroebus (557–668) and a hymn to Apollo (696–720).

In order to examine the transitions between scenes, we need to decide what constitutes a scene. De Jong, in her narratological commentary on the Odyssey, offers a working definition of a scene: “A narrative unit created by a combination of events or actions taking place at the same place and involving the same characters. A scene is usually told more or less mimetically, in that the text-time matches the fabula-time.”29 By this definition not all narrative is made up of scenes: exposition and summary, for instance, operate in different ways. There are various signals of narrative transition: change of setting (time and/or place), change of perspective (which characters are involved, from whose point of view the story is told, or through whom the story is focalised). Change of mode (moving from an interchange of direct speech, to narrator summary of intervening action, for instance) could be another indicator. For instance, in Thebaid 1, the sequence from 123–196, when the narrator summarises the decision to alternate rule between Polynices and Eteocles, then laments, and this is followed by the reaction of Eteocles and the speech of an anonymous critic, shows several different modes.30 Should these sections be considered part of one scene? I find it helpful to think of “scenes” and “sequences,” where a “sequence” is a larger organising unit consisting of several scenes strung together, which ends with a strong break point, while a scene is a smaller unit, usually unitary in place and time, which can end with a weak break point.31 Narrative transitions, of course, both divide the narrative into smaller units, and link the whole into one larger unit. The tension between continuity and change is one of the factors that makes this aspect of narrative rewarding to investigate; equally this tension reflects that at the heart of epic between the totalising reach of epic and the inevitably episodic nature of long narrative.32

In an interesting article, Waddell examines narrative transitions in Tacitus’ Annales in conjunction with Trajan’s column and cinema.33 He uses the idea of the “quick-cut” to explore the abrupt transitions in Tacitus (“the juxtaposition of two scenes that have little or no inherent connection”) and suggests various emotional and intellectual effects that this can have. I argue that the analogy with cinema is interesting and productive, but imperfect; we need to investigate transitional techniques on their own terms. Further, different genres habitually employ different narrative techniques, and even different poets use narrative transitions in their own ways. One goal of this paper, then, is to see what is Statian about Statius’ narrative transitions, and whether he straightforwardly follows Virgil or produces his own version of epic narrative.

In Thebaid 1, the first sequence after the proem involves Oedipus’ prayer going down to Tartarus, from where the Fury returns to Thebes, her actions cause various responses, the most important of which is that of Jupiter, arguably ending this sequence with the strong scene change to Olympus. However, the thematically related and contiguous journeys of the Fury, Mercury and Polynices create a sense of continuity between the events at Thebes and those in Argos and Olympus. The cosmology of epic, with its strong emphasis on divine action, also requires...

Indice dei contenuti

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• Meanwhile Back at the Ranch: Narrative Transition and Structural Intertextuality in Statius Thebaid 1
• Valerius Flaccus’ Argonautica 3.598–725: Epic, History, and Intertextuality
• Allusive Technique in the Argonautica of Valerius Flaccus
• Searching for Ovid at Cannae: A Contribution to the Reception of Ovid in Silius Italicus’ Punica
• The Flavian Epics and the Neoterics
• Allusive (Im-)Pertinence in Statius’ Epic
• Collateral Damage? Todeskette in Flavian Epic
• Replaying Dido: Elegy and the Poetics of Inversion in Valerius Flaccus’ Argonautica
• Foreshadowing Medea: Prolepsis and Intertextuality in Valerius Flaccus
• Ulysses as an Inter- (and Meta-)textual Hero in the Achilleid of Statius
• Constructing (Super-)characters: The Case Study of Silius’ Hannibal
• The Redemption of the Monster, or: The ‘Evil Hero’ in Ancient Epic
• Flavian Gods in Intertextual Perspective. How Rulers Used Religious Practice as a Means of Communicating
• Palatine Apollo, Augustan Architectural Ecphrasis, and Flavian Epic Intertextuality
• Statius’ Post-Vesuvian Landscapes and Virgil’s Parthenope
• Quantitative and Qualitative Perspectives on the Use of Poetic Tradition in Silius Italicus’ Punica
• Lemmatizing Latin and Quantifying the Achilleid
• How Rare are the Words that Make Up Intertexts? A Study in Latin and Greek Epic Poetry
• Pre- and Post-digital Poetics of ‘Transliteralism’: Some Greco-Roman Epic Incipits
• List of Contributors
• Index Locorum