Alius furor. Statius' Thebaid and the metamorphoses of Bacchus

The centrality of Bacchus’ role in Statius’ Thebaid is unprecedented in the epic tradition. Of Statius’ predecessors, only Ovid had accorded him a signif- icant on-stage role, while others, such as Virgil, made him important in indirect ways that are associated with the creative energies that drive the narrative. Sta- tius responds to his predecessors mainly by subverting the traditional Bacchic imaginary. The god emerges as largely ineffectual, neither a fully-fledged culture hero, nor a terrible punisher of hybris. As if to work athwart the god’s traditional role as ‘most terrible but also most sweet to mankind’ (Eur. Ba. 861) or ‘a mediator of peace but midmost in the fight’ (Hor. Odes 2.19.27–28), the poem oscillates be- tween war and peace, between deferral and continuation of its own action. This chapter examines the presentation of Bacchus in the Thebaid and some of the implications of this presentation for the poem’s poetic and ideological texture. There is particular discussion of Bacchus’ main interventions: in book 4 to fore- stall the Argive alliance’s assault on Thebes; and again in book 7 when he up- braids Jupiter for his complacency in allowing Thebes to be attacked, in both of which Bacchus emerges as unwarlike relative to his models and antagonists. Bac- chic manoeuvres proliferate: Venus encroaches on the territory of Bacchus by staging her own Bacchae in the Lemnian episode of book 5; Statius’ matrona (4.377–405) replays Lucan’s sibyl (1.679–95) in her Bacchic enthusiasm, which in the revised version signals the furor of civil war, and yet remains ineffective as a plot-motivator. Leaving aside Virgil and Ovid, Statius takes most closely after the sublime Dionysian furor of Lucan and Seneca, and yet what we find in the The- baid is an attenuated Bacchus, metamorphosed into the antithesis of the sublime aesthetic, a reduction of which the poem at several points shows metapoetic awareness. The chapter brings together the different strands of its argument by examining the role of Bacchus in the conclusion of the Thebaid.