Reconstructing Rome: Vespasian in the Capitolium | The Peripatetic View of the Passions | Blood, Guts, and Laughter: Dark Humour in Statius' Thebaid V | Lucretius and the Conquest of Emotion | Transforming Relationships through Emotional Expression in Sophocles' Electra | Brutalized Bodies and Broken Categories in Catullus 8 and 40

Blood, Guts, and Laughter: Dark Humour in Statius' Thebaid V

    The Thebaid, a Latin epic in twelve books on the tragic war between the sons of Oedipus, written by P. Papinius Statius (c. A.D. 45-96), is not noted for its humour. Nevertheless, there are scenes in the Thebaid that are unquestionably intended to be (darkly) comedic, and Statius did strive to make his horrifically violent epic aesthetically pleasing for his audience (Erren 1970). His efforts were largely successful, if we may judge from the wildly popular public recitations of the Thebaid described by Juvenal (7.82-87).
    The great success of Statius' aesthetic approach to gruesome violence -- while it may offend modern sensibilities -- is not surprising. Scenes of bloody death were common in the Roman arena and quite popular (Kyle 1998). Of particular interest are what Coleman (1990) calls "fatal charades": public executions staged as mythical enactments and found in all periods of the Principate, with several notable examples from the Flavian period recorded in Martial's Liber Spectaculorum (5, 7, 8, 21; cf. Coleman 1990: 62-5). Scholars have investigated the influence of these "fatal charades" on Senecan tragedy (Shelton 2000; Monaghan 2003), as well as the pleasing or humorous portrayal of (sexual) violence in Ovid (Segal 1994), but -- with the exception of a somewhat dismissive article by Erren (1970) -- these issues have yet to be pursued in Statian scholarship. Accordingly, I will discuss the possibility of intentional humour in the 5th book of Statius' Thebaid, in which the slave Hypsipyle tells the story of the women of Lemnos, whose failure to worship Venus incurred a divine wrath that compelled them to kill all of the men on the island, leaving Lemnos destitute until Jason and the Argonauts arrived.
    I will begin with a very brief overview of violence as entertainment in ancient Rome, paying particular attention to the possibility that Statius and his audience may have envisioned the Lemnian massacre as a "fatal charade". I will then examine the account of the massacre itself and the emotions it was designed to provoke in Statius' audience -- from horror mixed with Schadenfreude during the description of the massacre to full-blown laughter during the Lemnian women's farcical battle with the Argonauts. Finally, and most importantly, I will discuss the relationship of the Lemnian massacre to the subsequent events of the Thebaid: the baby Opheltes, whose care had been entrusted to Hypsipyle, is killed by a monstrous snake and Hypsipyle asserts that his death is a substitute for her father's, whom she refused to kill in the Lemnian massacre. I will show that Statius -- far from eschewing moral reflection or portraying violence for its own sake (cf. Erren 1970) -- actually presents a subtle challenge to popular Roman sentiment. By drawing a connection between the dark comedy of the Lemnian massacre, located within the "make-believe" world of Hypsipyle's narrative, and the horrific and pathetic death of Opheltes, placed in the "real world" of his own narrative, Statius prompts his audience to re-evaluate their enjoyment of Lemnian massacre, thereby preparing them to more fully and sympathetically appreciate the horrors of the war at Thebes that will occupy the remainder of the Thebaid.

Bibliography

Coleman, K. M. 1990. "Fatal Charades: Roman Executions Staged as Mythological Enactments," JRS 80: 44-73.
Erren, M. "Zierlicher Schauder: Das Gefällige am Grauen der Thebais des Statius," 88-95 in W. Wimmel (ed.), Forschungen zur römischen Literatur: Festschrift zum 60. Geburtstag von Karl Büchner. Wiesbaden: Franz Steiner.
Kyle, D. G. 1998. Spectacles of Death in Ancient Rome. New York: Routledge.
Monaghan, P. 2003. "Bloody Roman Narratives: Gladiators, 'Fatal Charades' & Senecan Theatre." Double Dialogues Issue 4. Online at www.doubledialogues.com
Segal, C. 1994. "Philomela's Web and the Pleasure of the Text: Reader and Violence in the Metamorphoses of Ovid," 257-80 in I. J. E. De Jong and J. P. Sullivan (eds.), Modern Critical Theory and Classical Literature. Leiden: Brill.
Shelton, J.-A. 2000. "The Spectacle of Death is Seneca's Troades," 87-118 in G. W. M. Harrison (ed.), Seneca in Performance. London: Duckworth.