Georgia Ferentinou, University of Toronto
The proem of Statius' Thebaid establishes Oedipus and his incestuous family (1.17: Oedipodae confusa domus) at the center of the epic narrative. The beginning of the narrative proper introduces Oedipus himself who enters the epic to deliver a prayer-cum-autobiography addressed to Tisiphone (1.56-87). In this paper, I shall explore the incestuous undertones of the Theban's programmatic speech as seen through his recapitulation of the mythic past as well as his construction of his relationship to the Fury. I shall argue that these undertones are adumbrated by the nexus of identity confusion, substitutes, and near-miss incest that underline Aeneas' relationship to his mother Venus and his paramour Dido respectively in Vergil's Aeneid: in other words, I shall argue that the Statian Oedipus channels the disturbing undercurrents in Aeneas' own family, which runs the risk of turning into an Oedipal one in the beginning of the Aeneid.
The danger of incest looms over the narrative of Aeneas' arrival and sojourn in Carthage, a city which in Schiesaro's words (2008: 97) is "The Romans' own Thebes, a world of ill-defined boundaries, incestuous tensions, blurred gendered identities, a household (and land) ambigua both because potentially untrustworthy and distrurbingly confused (my emphasis)." On the one hand, intertextuality and allusion problematize Venus' appearance to her son in Aen.1 not only because it is reminiscent of the goddess' sensual one to Aeneas' father, Anchises, but also because it foreshadows Dido's very own, thus creating a disturbing triangulation among the hero, his mother, and his soon-to-be lover (Gladhill 2012; Oliensis 2019: 437-9; Reckford 1995/6). On the other hand, Dido's and Aeneas' unfolding of their affair also carries quasi-incestuous undertones, this time of the kind between siblings (Hardie 2006). The danger of incest spills over even in the attachment the Carthaginian queen develops to Ascanius, with the latter being also marked by unstable idenity and substitution (McAuley 2015: 58-61; Rogerson 2015: 70-2). Turning to the world of the Thebaid and the other Cadmean city, although Oedipus' invocation to the Fury is chiefly seen as a reworking of the Allecto episode in Aeneid 7 (Ganiban 2007: 30-3), some scholars have noted in passing the far more intimate relationship Oedipus shares with Tisiphone, whom he presents as his surrogate mother (Bernstein 2015: 151; Hershkowitz 1998: 248).
My paper argues that the Oedipus-Tisiphone encounter in Thebaid 1 is Statius' own take on the Aeneas-Venus encounter in Aeneid 1. I shall show that this first scene proves Statius' awareness of the disturbing familial and erotic moments that permeate the first half of Vergil's epic, with Oedipus' speech functioning as a representation of an alternate reality in which the ultimately supressed danger of incest in the Aeneid comes in full fruition. Through a discussion of intertextuality and double-entendres, I aim to connect this speech to the problematic moments of the Venus-Aeneas-Dido triad in the Aeneid and to highlight its function as a disturbing, programmatic commentary on the Julio-Claudian dynasty in the post-Neronian world of Flavian Rome.