Kyle Gervais

I examine a dialogue between the Renaissance Supplements to Virgil's Aeneid by Pier Candido Decembrio and Maffeo Vegio. I argue that Decembrio's short poem is not unfinished but instead provides the Iliadic ending to the Aeneid that Virgil withholds, namely a lament over Turnus's body to match the lament over Hector at the end of Iliad 24. I then argue that Decembrio's poem presents us with a dangerously unstable situation in Italy, dominated by commemorations of Turnus in such heroic terms that they threaten to displace Virgil's hero Aeneas from primacy in his own story. Vegio's response "corrects" this portrayal of Turnus in favour of a more orthodox Virgilian narrative in which Turnus is a tragically misguided enemy of Aeneas's divine mission to Italy. I conclude with a new edition and translation of Decembrio's Supplement, drawing on both of the extant manuscripts and addressing several textual difficulties.

I argue that Aeneas’ companion Achates evokes the ancient etymologies of Aeneas from αἰνὸν ἄχος and Achilles from ἄχος. In the second half of the Aeneid, Achates signals the link between Achilles’ and Aeneas’ pain at the deaths of their friends Patroclus and Pallas ; Achates’ epithet fidus emphasizes Aeneas’ failed fides with Evander as a source of his grief. Aeneas is faced with conflicting obligations of fides in the finale but kills Turnus in the grip of a disturbing ἄχος.

I offer a close intertextual reading of the epilogue to Statius' Thebaid (12.810-19) that incorporates the epic and non-epic works of Lucretius, Horace, Virgil, Ovid, and Lucan; I identify nine previously unnoticed or undiscussed intertexts, and examine others in a new light. In this epilogue we find, first, a deep unease with the purposes of imperial Roman epic and the place of the Thebaid within that genre, and second, a bold attempt to separate Roman epic from the Roman empire in order to carve out a new kind of poetic immortality.

The text of Aeneid 7.5 (at pius exsequiis Aeneas rite solutis), on the rites performed for Caieta, is suspicious for several reasons, most notably the unparalleled sedes of Aeneas (beginning in the middle of a foot). I argue that Virgil wrote at pius Aeneas sacris iam rite solutis, and that exsequiis is an intrusive gloss (evidence for which may be found in the ancient manuscripts). With sacris, Virgil seems to be suggesting cult honours as part of a complex allusion to Apollonius’ Argonautica and Callimachus’ Hecale. I also discuss four verse passages in Ovid, Petronius, and Columella to argue that sacris would suggest a cult and, especially, that Ovid and Columella had a text of Virgil with sacris, not exsequiis. This emendation is printed in the text of G. B. Conte's editio altera of the Aeneid (Teubner, 2019).

I argue that various allusion to Aeneid 12 in Thebaid 12 abridge the earlier narrative, cutting out difficult scenes so that Theseus and Creon’s duel becomes a more straightforward battle between right and wrong than that of Aeneas and Turnus. These “abridging allusions” are one of several techniques used to thematize narrative speed in Thebaid 12, in contrast to the thematization of delay in earlier books. I first discuss delay as a central feature in the two epics, then examine Statius’ abridging allusions and situate them in various ongoing debates about the poem and its relationship with the Aeneid.

At Theb. 2.320 print cura or cura est (plerique codd.) not curis. At 501 print nocendi (nonnulli codd.) not latendi. At 631 print illo (Watt) not illa. At 685 print mersum (Gervais) not plenum. At 693 print aetheros (Gervais) not aeris.

© 2014 Cambridge University Press

I discuss Adrastus’ tale of Linus and Coroebus (Theb. 1.557-668), Hypsipyle’s Lemnian tale (5.17-498), and Statius’ address to his poem in the epilogue (12.810-19). Reading through the first two inset (“metadiegetic”) narratives with an eye to intertextuality and intratextuality, I argue that they offer sustained examinations of parent–child conflict: dangerous offspring, cruel or negligent parents, and especially the deaths of children. I then turn to the epilogue, which is marked by particularly rich intertextuality. I argue that here, Statius figures the Thebaid as his child, which he sends away into an uncertain future. I uncover a “filicidal voice” that runs through the poem, culminating in Statius’ address to the dead sons of Oedipus (11.574-9), but also detectable in the epilogue; this voice stands in conflict with Statius’ pose as a worried father at the end of the epic. I conclude that the gloomy view of parent–child relationships in the two long inset narratives reflects Statius’ ambivalent relationship with his own poetic “child”. At the end I turn briefly to consider the death of Opheltes, which draws a strong connection between the death of children and the death of narration.

A close intertextual reading of Tydeus’ monomachy in Statius, Thebaid 2.527–723 uncovers a surprising range of self-contradictory heroic and monstrous models for his actions, drawn from throughout Latin epic. This intertextual confusion is connected with five important symbols and three important themes in the poem.

"While Telamon appears in most previous accounts of the Calydonian boar hunt, Ixion never does. Instead we find Ixion’s son, Pirithous. Lactantius explains: Ixiona: Pirithoum significari uidetur, Ixionis filius. Subsequent scholars have not questioned this perverse reading, but the text is clearly corrupt.

Statius wrote iam natum Ixione."

"In this chapter I explore ways of viewing violence in the Thebaid.  Like other authors in this book and elsewhere, I look to film studies for a theoretical framework. I do not, however, work much with psychoanalytical or feminist film theory;  rather, I adopt some ideas from the broad and developing field of cognitive film theory. In particular, I work with Murray Smith’s ideas about ‘character engagement’  and Paul Gormley’s articulation of the relationship between ‘affect’ and ‘meaning’.  But my writing is not primarily theoretical. Instead, I compare three representative scenes of violence from the Thebaid – the battle of Tydeus against the fifty Thebans (2.496-743), Hypsipyle’s account of the Lemnian massacre (5.28-498) and the mutual fratricide of Polynices and Eteocles (11.403-573) – with three scenes from the films of Quentin Tarantino – the ‘Showdown at House of Blue Leaves’ in Kill Bill: Vol. 1 (2003), the ‘ear-cutting’ scene in Reservoir Dogs (1992) and the assassination of Hitler in Inglourious Basterds (2009).

While classicists have traditionally confined themselves to the study of films set in the ancient world,  the application of film theory to classical texts implies that modern cinema and classical literature share many preoccupations and can be studied together.  Thus, I do not argue for any ties of reception between the poetry of Statius and the cinema of Tarantino; instead, I suggest that author and auteur  work with violence in similar ways.  Both foreground vision in their presentations of violence.  Both present scenes of extreme violence that provoke affective responses.  And both set against these responses complex intertextual and cultural signifiers.

These last two points shape my arguments throughout the three comparisons in this chapter. First (discussing Thebaid 2 and Kill Bill Vol. 1), I show that the affective power of violence, figured as φαντασία in ancient epic, is blunted by intertextuality, which reminds the audience of its position outside of the fiction on display. Next (Thebaid 5 and Reservoir Dogs), I argue that author and filmmaker exploit affect, intertextuality and cultural knowledge to manipulate the role of the viewer of violence, suggesting in the end that viewing violence is a choice. Finally (Thebaid 11 and Inglourious Basterds) I show how Statius and Tarantino, at the climaxes of their works, remove all internal viewers with whom the audience could easily engage or whose gaze could invest the violent spectacles with meaning.
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Critical discussions of Hor. Carm. I, 36 are rare, and fail adequately to consider two important points. First, although written in honour of the otherwise unknown Numida, the poem’s implied addressee is L. Aelius Lamia,( ) a member of a distinguished family that Horace mentions three times in the Odes (I, 26, 8; I, 36, 7; III, 17, 1; also at Ep. I, 14, 6.), carefully shaping his literary presentation to fit with important thematic concerns of the Odes. Second, and perhaps unexpectedly, Carm. I, 36 shares several unappreciated verbal links with Carm. I, 24 on the death of Quintilius, which can hardly be dismissed as meaningless.

I will address each of these two issues in turn, demonstrating first that literary analyses have misidentified the L. Aelius Lamia of the Odes and have failed to appreciate how Horace constructs his personality, and then that the place of the Numida ode in Horace’s first book—especially its links with the Quintilius ode—involve it in a sustained meditation on the uneasy relationship between the poetic-sympotic realm and the cares and dangers that surround it. I end with a brief reading of the Numida ode that takes these factors into consideration, and show that the effect of the poem lies in the tension between (on the surface) a simple description of a wild homecoming celebration and (more subtly) a reflection on such weighty issues as aging and death, the ephemeral nature of youth and love, and the tension between poetic-sympotic securitas and the vagaries of a world ruled by Fortune and death.