29 Statius in Dante’s Commedia

Abstract

As shown by Edwards in this volume, 1 Dante regards Statius as one of the great poets of Latin epic; his works are full of references which make it clear that he had an extensive and intimate knowledge of the Thebaid and Achilleid.2 What makes Dante's Commedia such a unique and important moment in the reception of Statius is not this, however; it is that the poet appears as a significant speaking character his own right.What is more, Dante conceives of his Statius as a Christian, 3 an intervention which has greatly perplexed readers from his day to ours.The puzzlement of Dante's near-contemporaries suggests that Statius' Christianity was news to them, too. 4 To understand how Dante could have conceived of such a bold fiction, we must remember that the Silvae had not yet been discovered, so all of the biographical details we learn from that text were unknown.Dante drew his idiosyncratic portrait upon a nearly blank canvas.There have been three main approaches to explaining the mystery of Statius' Christianity.The first has been to identify a particular moment in the Thebaid where the rhetoric might have belied for Dante a Christian theology.An early candidate was Capaneus' pronouncement that the pagan gods are mere projections from human fear: "it was fear that first brought gods into the world" (primus in orbe deos fecit timor, Theb.3.661).5 This strategy was also adopted by Politian, who looked to Tiresias' mantic reference to an unknowable and unnameable god, the pinnacle of the three-fold universe (triplicis mundi summum, 4.516).6 Apart from the fleeting nature of these statements, the main problem with this approach is obvious: Capaneus is hardly the most noble mouthpiece to convey the author's theological sentiments, and Dante puts Tiresias in Hell with the false prophets (Inf.20.40-5).7 Hence a second strategy: to look for an external source, either a biographical tradition or an allegorical reading of passages or characters in the Thebaid that Dante might have drawn upon.The search for a convincing biographical source has been a failure.8 There were medieval allegorical readings of the Thebaid, but their relevance has been greatly overstated.9 Much has been made of the allegorizing commentary falsely attributed to Fulgentius, but it is certainly late in date and there is no evidence that it circulated at all; 1 Edwards, pp.{000-000}.2 Moore (1896) 243-55.3 There is a vast bibliography on this aspect of the Commedia, and it would be beside the point of this Statius-focused study to attempt to survey it systematically.For starting points, see Paratore (1976) 425 and Heil (2002) 73-9.4 See the mid-fourteenth century commentary of Benvenuto da Imola, in Lacaita (1887) 3. 5 Cf.Benvenuto da Imola, in Lacaita (1887) 3-4.6 Mariotti (1975).Politian evidently was looking for a passage just before the Argives arrive at the Langia; see below.7 Mariotti (1975) 156-7.8 Anderson (2009) 3.65-73.9

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