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8 - Dining with the emperor: Silvae 4.2

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  22 September 2009

Carole E. Newlands
Carole E. Newlands
Affiliation:
University of Wisconsin, Madison
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Summary

‘A poet cannot know his theme until the emperor orders it. Until then he should think of nothing but the sublime classics of the past. But I knew I would be commanded to celebrate a great act and the greatest act of our age is the building of the new palace … How many captives died miserably quarrying its stone? … Yet this building which barbarians think a long act of intricately planned cruelty has given the empire this calm and solemn heart where honoured guests and servants can command peace and prosperity till the end of time.’

Alasdair Gray, Five Letters from an Eastern Empire

Book 4, published as a separate collection of Silvae in ad 95, marks a new departure for Statius in that it begins with a sequence of three poems addressed to Domitian. The emperor's assumption of his seventeenth consulship on 1 January ad 95, provides the occasion for Silv. 4. 1. As is characteristic of Statius' poems of imperial praise, the poet's voice is occluded by that of Janus who speaks the encomium of the emperor from his new temple in Domitian's Forum Transitorium, the Temple of Janus Quadrifrons. Flanked on one side by Vespasian's Temple of Peace, and on the other by the Forum of Augustus and the Temple of Mars Ultor, the new forum of Domitian was symbolically linked with both peace and war.

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Statius' Silvae and the Poetics of Empire , pp. 260 - 283
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication year: 2002

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