‘Closure: Get Over It’
Miss Manners 12/6/98

‘I know, it probably doesn't have the sense of closure that you want, but it has more than some of our other cases.’
Agent Dana Scully on ‘The X-Files’

Thebaid 12 is a problematic ending to a disturbing poem. Part of the problem is the unsatisfactory nature of the final book. Book 12 is itself concerned with the processes of ending and its problems. The main narrative of the Thebaid is the story of the sons of Oedipus, Eteocles and Polynices, and their battle over the throne at Thebes. Their final confrontation occurs in Book 11. This ending is full of closural allusions and very closely linked to the ending of the Aeneid and its final battle between Aeneas and Turnus. If the poem is ‘over’ after Book 11, why does Statius write the final book? It's not enough to say—as critics have—that it's just badly structured poetry.

‘she is always and never the same’
(advertising slogan for ‘Contradiction’, a ‘fragrance for women’ by Calvin Klein, 1999)

In the first poem of his second book, Propertius presents an emphatic declaration of his status as a love poet, slyly incorporating a detailed recusatio to Maecenas, who he claims has requested that he compose epic instead. Later in the poem, Propertius' preference for elegy over epic seems to be echoed by the predilections of his lover Cynthia, who, as Propertius insists, finds the entire Iliad distasteful. According to Propertius, Cynthia's aversion to the poem emerges from a very specific source: the epic's primary female protagonist, Helen. For, as Propertius recalls it, Cynthia disapproves of the whole epic precisely because she finds fault with its ‘leuis’ heroine: si memini, solet ilia leuis culpare puellas,/et totam ex Helena non probat Iliada (‘If I remember, she is accustomed to castigate mutable women and does not approve of the whole Iliad because of Helen’, 2.1.49f.).

In his Life of Augustus Suetonius records that just before his death the emperor requested that his appearance be made right, and that he then spoke some lines of Greek verse:

Blemyis capita absunt, uultus in pectore est. Satyris praeter effigiem nihil humani. Aegipanum quae celebratur ea forma est. haec de Africa.
Pomponius Mela Chorographia 1.48

The Blemyes lack heads: their faces are in their chests. There is nothing typical of humans about the Satyrs, apart from their superficial appearance. The Aegipanes have the shape described in stories. So much for Africa.

How useful are Roman geographical texts? Outrageous claims like the one cited above have invited scepticism concerning the scientific value of geographies and ethnographies produced by Roman authors. To a large extent, the importance attributed to a geographical text will depend on what is being sought from that text. For example, O.A.W. Dilke tells us that, ‘We are fortunate in possessing all seventeen books of the Geography of Strabo,’ and that Strabo ‘shows good critical power in assessing earlier geographical writers and giving us a verbal picture of the known world of the time.’ However, ‘a contrast with Strabo's work is provided by the very simple and popular Chorographia of Pomponius Mela,’ of which Dilke expresses die view that it would have been preferable had Juba II's work survived.