Emma SCIOLI
Inchoat Ismene: Dreaming of Destruction in Statius' Thebaid


In book VIII of Statius' Thebaid, Oedipus' daughter Ismene, a character who has thus far had no presence in the epic's narrative, recounts to her sister Antigone a disturbing dream of the disruption of her wedding ceremony. Statius introduces her speech with the words inchoat Ismene (line 622). The verb inchoare has a double resonance, for this is not only the first instance of Ismene's speech, but it also marks her entry into the narrative as an individual. Statius' use of this verb has further significance because it foreshadows the interruption of her story (as well as her hopes for marriage) by the intrusion of the war's carnage (the delivery of her fatally injured fiancé) less than twenty lines later. I propose that Ismene's retelling of her dream to her sister constitutes a particularly female form of subjective expression in the context of Statius' epic poem, one similar to lamentation. In her recent study,Donka Markus (Arethusa, 2004) has demonstrated that female lament in the Thebaid forces a private form of expression into the public realm. In this paper I consider what happens when this dynamic is reversed, and the external action of the battlefield intrudes upon the interior world of the female dreamer. By privileging the perspective of a character excluded from the war, I argue, Statius critiques the war's horrors through the dream experience of a non-participant.

 

Ismene's mental detachment from the events of the war is manifested by the physical seclusion of her setting, as the vast expanse and dangers of the battlefield are immediately contrasted with the inviolability of the women's chambers (interea thalami secreta in parte sorores, line 607). Ismene's isolation from the war is further demonstrated by her inability to understand the implications of her dream, or to allow for its interpretation by her sister (lines 633-35). In his depiction of the sisters' interaction, Statius reinterprets a paradigm familiar from the dream episodes of unwed female characters in earlier epics, such as Medea in Apollonius' Argonautica, or Ilia in the Annales of Ennius. But he draws direct attention to the relationship between the sisters through an analogy with the daughters of Pandion, Procne and Philomela, who were transformed into birds (sic Pandioniae…volucres, line 616). As the daughters of Oedipus recapitulate between themselves the familial woes which have caused the war which rages outside of the parameters of their observation (lines 610-15), the daughters of Pandion review the horrors of their past as they return to their nests (lines 618-19). It is important to note that Procne and Philomela communicate in a language which is comprehensible only to them (lines 619-20). Furthermore, this reference to their indiscernible but yet word-like chirping recalls an earlier instance of communication between the sisters, when Philomela wove an image into a tapestry to convey the violence she had suffered at the hands of her sister's husband, as recounted by Ovid in book VI of his Metamorphoses. Whereas Philomela successfully used non-verbal communication to subvert her captor's plans, Ismene communicates the destructiveness of her brothers' fratricidal war through the verbal translation of her visual dream experience but fails to comprehend its meaning.


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