Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Acknowledgments
- 1 Introduction
- 2 Embodying the statue: Silvae 1.1 and 4.6
- 3 Engendering the house: Silvae 1.2 and 3.4
- 4 Imperial pastoral: Vopiscus' villa in Silvae 1.3
- 5 Dominating nature: Pollius' villa in Silvae 2.2
- 6 Reading the Thebaid: Silvae 1.5
- 7 The emperor's Saturnalia: Silvae 1.6
- 8 Dining with the emperor: Silvae 4.2
- 9 Building the imperial highway: Silvae 4.3
- References
- Index locorum
- Index of subjects and proper names
1 - Introduction
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 22 September 2009
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Acknowledgments
- 1 Introduction
- 2 Embodying the statue: Silvae 1.1 and 4.6
- 3 Engendering the house: Silvae 1.2 and 3.4
- 4 Imperial pastoral: Vopiscus' villa in Silvae 1.3
- 5 Dominating nature: Pollius' villa in Silvae 2.2
- 6 Reading the Thebaid: Silvae 1.5
- 7 The emperor's Saturnalia: Silvae 1.6
- 8 Dining with the emperor: Silvae 4.2
- 9 Building the imperial highway: Silvae 4.3
- References
- Index locorum
- Index of subjects and proper names
Summary
To the Reader
With the same leave, the ancients called that kind of body sylva, or ‘γ́λη, in which there were works of diverse nature and matter congested, as the multitude call timber-trees, promiscuously growing, a wood or forest; so am I bold to entitle these lesser poems of later growth by this of Underwood, out of the analogy they hold to The Forest in my former book, and no otherwise.
Ben Jonson, preface to Underwood
This book about Statius' Silvae, a diverse collection of poems of praise, sets out to make large claims about Statius' ‘lesser poems of later growth’. Written as his epic poem the Thebaid was reaching completion, and published in two sets late in the reign of the emperor Domitian in ad 93 and 95, the Silvae have been often dismissed as ‘occasional’ and therefore trivial verse. The subject matter of the Silvae – banquets, the emperor's new statue, a new road – have been taken as evidence of the political and literary decadence of an age that no longer had anything important to say. Despite important work that has recently been done on the Silvae, they continue to be branded with this derogatory stereotype. Yet, as Gunn points out, ‘all poetry is occasional: whether the occasion is an external event like a birthday or a declaration of war, whether it is an occasion of the imagination, or whether it is in some sort of combination of the two … The occasion in all cases – literal or imaginary – is the starting point, only, of a poem’.
- Type
- Chapter
- Information
- Statius' Silvae and the Poetics of Empire , pp. 1 - 45Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 2002