Mark MASTERSON
Amphiaraus, Pluto, and Poetics in Statius' Thebaid 8

 

The confrontation between Pluto and Amphiaraus commencing Book Eight of Statius' Thebaid is not found in other narratives of Amphiaraus' life. Vessey suggests that Statius innovates in his staging of this scene (1973, 71). Such innovation invites metapoetical analysis; the exigencies of the epic tradition apparently did not demand this particular confrontation. Taking my cue from Hardie's (1993) arguments on the prevalence of impersonation in Roman epic and Henderson's (1991, 69) comments on a closeness between the poet and Amphiaraus, I argue that Amphiaraus arriving alive to Hell as a vir (7.750) with his arma (7.819), provides both a point of identification for the poet and the means for a further and simultaneous identification of the poet with Pluto. The identification with and specularization of the hero Amphiaraus enable both a meditation on epic poetics and a purposefully ambiguous statement of Statius' conception of his place in the epic succession starting from Homer.

 

Through much of the Thebaid, Amphiaraus provides a point of identification for the poet. Amphiaraus and the poet share a title (vates), a fondness for delay (mora), and a similarly dim view of the prospects for the war. Both of them also capitulate to war. Surrendering to virtus, Amphiaraus kills many men during his Book Seven aristeia and the poet, not eschewing narration of the manly work of slaughter, often offers commentary whose moralizing force is unclear (e.g. 7.705-711). In Book Eight this relationship becomes closer. Pluto accuses Amphiaraus of having come to the underworld by means of a disallowed path (limite non licito, 8.84-85). This accusation, whose immediate referent is the scandal of Amphiaraus' arrival to the underworld still alive, connects Amphiaraus to the poet and poetics through its use of the word limes, a word Statius pointedly uses to designate his entire epic at 1.16. Statius also uses limes to describe the path the Thebans said would always open up before Tydeus in battle (9.182-83). This use of limes in Book Nine, when considered with its uses in Books One and Eight, further joins a heroic masculinity to the work the poet does. Limes, multivalent, designates the way to hell, the plot of the poem, and the bloody work of a warrior on the battlefield (from which Amphiaraus has just come). Accordingly then, the reader of Book Eight should see in Amphiaraus the poet confronting in Pluto a tradition, prior and deadly, and yet the source of vitality, when Amphiaraus addresses Pluto as cunctis finitor maxime rerumet sator (8.91-3).

 

The angered Pluto provides another point of identification for the poet. Again, comparison between Books Eight and One enables a metapoetical reading. Just as Amphiaraus "falls upon" (incidit, 8.1) the underworld and is "warm with war's sweat" as he does so (belli sudore calens, 8.7), so "a Pierian fever falls upon" Statius (Pierius menti calor incidit, 1.3), spurring him to compose. The arrival of Amphiaraus accordingly may be read as similar to the inspiration that launches the Thebaid, especially since it provokes an "inspired" Pluto to send Tisiphone to the upper world to "write" the rest of the Thebaid (8.65-77). Furthermore, the fact that Amphiaraus is a vir who has arrived with his arma is of manifest programmatic importance through its reference to the Aeneid. Is Statius/Pluto plagued by thoughts of the glorious antecedent Aeneid?

 

Below Earth, then, Statius encourages the reader to see in both the expiring Amphiaraus and Pluto an impersonation of the poet. This simultaneous inhabiting of two personae makes an admission of belatedness (cf. Hinds 1998, 91-98) that is offset by pretensions to a heroic masculinity and, indeed, to divinity.

 

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