Burning up, melting down, collapsing in: Fire imagery, narrative articulation, funerals, and the incestuous poetics of Statius' Thebaid

Lovatt, Helen

Abstract

This chapter explores fire imagery in Statius’ Thebaid, its relationship to ritual and narrative articulation. Fire is often involved in Roman ritual, associated with catastrophic destruction alongside purification and release. The Thebaid’s complex narrative structure and temporality inspires much recent work (Simms, Chinn); lament and burial have also long shaped the poem’s interpretation. I argue that one key tension of the Thebaid’s poetics is encapsulated in fire imagery: that between inward-pulling collapse (the burnt-out pyre) and unstoppable destruction and contagion (urbs capta and forest fire). These motifs draw on two important structural points in Virgil’s Aeneid: the burning of Troy and the pyre of Dido, as well as their reworkings in Ovid, Lucan and Valerius Flaccus. This approach relocates the issue of closure in the Thebaid from the external deus ex machina figure of Theseus to the interior of the poem, focusing on: the contamination of beginnings and endings; the all-consuming pyre and grief for Opheltes; the contagion of Capaneus’ fiery destruction; and the battle and lament narratives of book 12, as seen through imagery of fires building up and dying down. The chapter suggests that the incestuous subject matter of Thebes tends to collapse the Thebaid in on itself.

Citation

Lovatt, H. (2023). Burning up, melting down, collapsing in: Fire imagery, narrative articulation, funerals, and the incestuous poetics of Statius' Thebaid. In A.-N. Roumpou (Ed.), Ritual and the Poetics of Closure in Flavian Literature (135-160). De Gruyter. https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110770483-009

• Online Publication Date: Dec 22, 2023
• Publication Date: Dec 22, 2023
• Deposit Date: Dec 21, 2023
• Publicly Available Date: Dec 23, 2024
• Publisher: De Gruyter
• Pages: 135-160
• Series Title: Trends in Classics - Supplementary Volumes
• Series Number: 147
• Series ISSN: 1868-4785
• Book Title: Ritual and the Poetics of Closure in Flavian Literature
• Chapter Number: 9
• ISBN: 9783110770469
• DOI: https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110770483-009
• Public URL: https://nottingham-repository.worktribe.com/output/28714624
• Publisher URL: https://www.degruyter.com/document/doi/10.1515/9783110770483-009/html
• Contract Date: Dec 1, 2023