A commentary on selected passages of Statius, Thebaid 6
Book 6 of Statius’ *Thebaid* narrates the climax of the Argive army’s stay at Nemea: the funeral of the royal prince Opheltes, who had been killed by the serpent of Jupiter in Book 5, and the athletic games held in his honour. This thesis contains a line-by-line commentary on the opening section, which gives an aetiology of the Panhellenic Games (1-24), the funerary pyre of Opheltes (54-83), the felling of the Nemean grove (84-117), the lament of Eurydice (135-92), the cremation of Opheltes (193-237), the footrace (550- 645), the discus contest (646-730), and the wrestling match (826-910). Throughout, the commentary elucidates the book’s role as a microcosm of the *Thebaid* as a whole: the funeral rites for Opheltes encapsulate the suffering wrought by the Theban war while the athletic contests foreshadow the deaths of the Seven princes which occupy the second half of the poem. The commentary also brings out the characteristic features of Statian language, such as the compression of syntax, extension of conventional semantics and an in interest in the paradoxical affecting every aspect of his poetry. Although the text used for this thesis is based on the edition of Hall and his collaborators (2007-2008), the notes frequently espouse diverging editorial decisions, which are reflected in the corresponding lemmata. The commentary takes a more conservative view of the poem’s transmission, rejecting many of Hall’s interventions, and argues against Statian authorship for most of the book’s suspected interpolations.
Commentary, Epic, Latin literature, Latin poetry, Statius, Textual criticism, Thebaid
Networked Digital Library of Theses and Dissertations