Lucan Statius and Silius

The final 160 lines of Lucan’s Bellum Civile 8 describe the makeshift funeral of the slain Roman general Pompey the Great on the Egyptian shore (8.712-872). The funeral is carried out by a follower of Pompey named Cordus who, despite his best efforts, makes a mess of things: the funeral is hurried, half complete, distorted, and ritually corrupt. Lucan belabors the perversion of Pompey’s funeral, castigating Cordus with narratorial interjections bemoaning the manner of Pompey’s ending.

Although Vergil’s Jupiter promised imperium sine fine, Silius’s Jupiter does not guarantee it and instead encourages the Flavian dynasty to preserve the integrity of Rome through expansion and the conquest of distant lands (per uulnera regnum, 3.588). Silius uses geography to communicate the victory of Scipio, who defeats Hannibal and ensures Roman imperium, and to praise the Flavian emperors in the Punica.

Scholarly treatments of Cato’s encounter with the Libyan serpents in Lucan’s Bellum Civile (9.607-949) have revealed it as one of the poem’s most confounding and thematically dense sections. Over the last several decades, scholarship has highlighted how its engagement with various literary and allegorical traditions paint a complex, even subversive, portrait as Cato and his forces struggle across the desert (Johnson 1987, 35-66; Batinski 1992; Bartsch 1997, 29-35; Leigh 2000).

In the final book of Statius’s Thebaid, Theseus arrives in Thebes carrying a shield inscribed with an image of himself fighting the minotaur, a deed now firmly fixed in the past. The Thebans, terrified by the combined effect of Theseus and his shield, “see Theseus double, and double his hands soaked in gore” (bis Thesea bisque cruentas/ caede videre manus, 12.673-4). Theseus, however, “himself looking, remembers past deeds” (veteres reminiscitur actus/ ipse tuens, 12.674-5).

Eating in the Thebaid should make us uneasy. From Tantalus’ feast (1.246-7) to Tydeus’ cephalophagy, meals gone wrong beget violence and suggest the breakdown of both social order (Coffee 2009) and the boundary between human and animal (Gervais 2015), illustrating the disorder and perversity prevalent in Statius’ universe. This paper examines one such meal, and argues that the simile that Statius deploys within it contains disturbing implications of bloodthirstiness, bestial furor, and even cannibalism.