Statius’ Thebaid and the Poetics of Civil War. By CHARLES MCNELIS. 

Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007. Pp. x + 203. Cloth, $96.00. 

ISBN 978–0–521–86741–2.



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CJ Online 2009.03.03



[[This review was commissioned by the previous CJ Book Review editor, and 

has been handled since then by S. Douglas Olson.]]



A recent survey of scholarship on Statius’ epic concludes that “the 

overall message of the Thebaid is not easy to extrapolate,” noting that 

power, pietas, anti-pietas, fury, the anger of Jupiter, civil war, 

allegory, dynastic succession and literature as a form of escapism have all 

been proposed as principal themes of the poem. [[1]] One key to a more 

definitive interpretation may lie in a fuller appreciation of Statius’ 

use of his Greek poetic predecessors. Although Statius explicitly situates 

his epic in relation to Vergil (Theb. 12.816; Silv. 4.7.25–8), [[2]] he 

studied poetic composition with a father deeply learned in Greek verse and 

chose for the subject of his epic a theme best known from classical 

Athenian tragedy. Charles McNelis’ (hereafter M.) study of the 

intertextual relationship between the Thebaid and the works of Callimachus 

thus represents a timely effort to shed light on an important and 

relatively understudied aspect of Statius’ epic poetics.



M. contends that Statius creates a program of allusion to Callimachean 

poetics and anti-Callimacheanism that mirrors the conflict over Thebes at 

the heart of the Thebaid (p. 1). Callimachean poetics is characterized as 

endorsing “small-scale creations that enjoy peaceful settings,” and is 

contrasted with the “large-scale productions about violence and strife” 

(p. 70) created by the Telchines. When M. finds allusions to Callimachus 

together with significant delay, an undermining of traditional epic heroism 

or a resistance to closure, he reads these gestures as appeals to 

Callimachean poetics. This poetic program counters, but often must yield 

to, a Telchinic drive for war more consonant with Statius’ epic 

predecessors, above all Homer and Vergil (e.g. pp. 44–5, 97–8, 132). 

Thus, as much as the conflict over Thebes reflects Roman concerns about 

civil war, the allusions to Callimachus act out a struggle over whether and 

how to tell a civil war story.



M. lays out this argument in his introduction, and elaborates it through 

six chapters that take episodes of the poem in order. Chapter 1 examines 

the aetion of the Argive festival of Apollo told by Adrastus in Thebaid 

1.557–668. M. argues that, through allusion to related Homeric and 

Vergilian scenes, Statius creates the expectation that the aetion will show 

the gods establishing control of the cosmos, but then presents them as 

allying with chthonic forces, thereby “reject[ing] the notion that 

control and order are dependent upon the gods” (p. 47). Here various 

allusions to Callimachus’ version of the story help “disrup[t] the 

theological vision of earlier epic” (p. 37). Chapter 2 centers on the 

ekphrasis of Harmonia’s necklace at 2.269–305. M. argues that Statius 

mentions Vulcan, the Telchines and the Cyclopes when describing the 

necklace in ways that allude to the conflict between Callimachus and his 

detractors on view in the Aetia prologue. This and subsequent allusions 

“establis[h] that the narrative of Theban violence has an 

anti-Callimachean programme” (p. 52).



The interpretation of the necklace becomes a touchstone for the remainder 

of the book. In Chapter 3, M. reads the delay of the Argive armies at Nemea 

in Books 4–6 as a Callimachean “counterpoint to the martial agenda 

devised by Vulcan and his assistants” (p. 77). Chapter 4 argues that 

delay at the beginning of Thebaid 7 represents a final gesture of 

allegiance to Callimachean poetics (pp. 98–9) before the war begins. In 

Chapter 5, M. interprets the deaths of five of the seven heroes of the 

Argive contingent as representative of “an anti-Callimachean poetic 

agenda that exemplifies the narrative of violence and intestine warfare 

created in part by the Telchines” (p. 124). Chapter 6 argues that “epic 

models are challenged by allusions to Callimachus’ poetry” (p. 176) to 

produce an open ending to the poem signifying the difficulty of concluding 

civil war. An epilogue restates the thesis that Statius uses Callimachus to 

voice an alternative to grand, heroic epic narratives.



M.’s study takes as a premise, without explanation, a firm conception of 

Callimachean poetics as advocating non-heroic, non-linear, open-ended 

poetic narratives. This is a commonly accepted interpretation, but, given 

the importance of Callimachean poetics to M.’s book, one would have liked 

some discussion of how he arrived at this conception, including some 

consideration of Cameron’s views, however unorthodox. Nor does M. 

consider what the unleashing of dueling poetic programs within the epic 

signifies about Statius’ own poetics. If in the end Statius sides with 

Callimachus entirely, why does he compose a long, ultimately linear poem 

about warfare? Is he rather staging the defeat of Callimachean ideals? Or 

is he somehow disinterested? Discussion of this question might have made an 

apt theme for M.’s epilogue.



M. offers no discussion of his approach to intertextuality, but his 

interpretations at times set a demanding standard for the poem’s 

audience, or perhaps rely implicitly upon the notion that it is the critic 

alone who produces meaning. Such is the case with the use of Harmonia’s 

necklace as a key to interpretation. Once M. has argued that allusions to 

Callimachus in the necklace ekphrasis refer to contrasting poetic programs, 

he then understands subsequent references to Callimachus in the remaining 

ten books of the poem, however slight and in whatever context, as referring 

to this conflict. Readings of individual passages also seem to envision 

readers tracing wide-ranging and subtle allusions, as when M. argues that 

an intertextual nexus contributes to Coroebus’ effort to shame Apollo 

into desisting from his slaughter of Argives (p. 45). The argument proceeds 

as follows: Coroebus speaks of the inclementia of the gods (1.651); the 

most notable example of clementia is the altar at 12.481–518; the 

clementia of the altar is a translation of the Greek eleos; the mention of 

inclementia at 1.651 thus brings to mind eleos; this in turn recalls 

Apollo’s appeal to eleos at Il. 24.44 to persuade Achilles to end his 

anger; so Coroebus is challenging Apollo (intertextually) to live up to the 

values he espoused in Il. 24. Some theoretical discussion of how intertexts 

signify might have given M.’s reader a benchmark against which to measure 

the efficacy of such chains of allusion.



At the same time, when M. focuses more tightly on inter- and intratextual 

connections, he offers compelling readings of key passages. Thus he nicely 

details the resonances of Harmonia’s necklace with Homer, Callimachus, 

Ovid, Statius’ Siluae and other parts of the Thebaid. His concise 

discussion of the duel of Eteocles and Polynices in light of the final 

duels in the Iliad and Aeneid (p. 147) is equally illuminating. And M. 

illustrates that the triumphal return of Theseus looks rather equivocal by 

comparison with the finality of Augustus’ triumph on the shield of Aeneas 

(pp. 175–6).



In the end, M. delivers a thoughtful reading of Statius’ use of 

Callimachus, with telling observations on other intertextual links. I 

myself did not find the argument for a thoroughgoing program of 

Callimachean allusion fully persuasive. But M. has shed substantial light 

on Statius’ use of Callimachus, and has thus opened up a new perspective 

that, alongside others, will form the basis for continuing interpretation 

of Statius’ epic.



NEIL COFFEE

University at Buffalo, SUNY





[[1]] K. Pollmann, Statius, Thebais 12: Introduction, Text and Commentary 

(Paderborn, 2004) 26.



[[2]] See R. Ganaban, Statius and Virgil: The Thebaid and the 

Reinterpretation of the Aeneid (Cambridge, 2007).





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