STATIUS, P. Papinius, the son of the above, was probably born about A.D. 61, and at a very early age he excited by his precocious talents the admiration of his father's patrons. It was a miserable school for a young and clever boy, and we trace the flatterer and protégé in all his works. Before his father's death he won a crown at the Neapolitan games, and was thrice victor in the Alban Quinquatria. During Domitian's reign he and Martial were the accredited poets of the imperial court. At that time poems were first made known by public recitation; a pernicious custom, which had been disliked and discouraged by Horace, but which had increased under the injudicious approval of Ovid, and the practice and patronage of Nero and Domitian. A most bril-
Statius. liant and lively picture of these public readings is given by M. Nisard in his Études sur les Poètes de la Décadence, from particulars gleaned out of the writings of Pliny, Martial, and Seneca. Statius was the most fashionable reciter of the day; and even Juvenal, who reckons "the poets spouting in the dog-days" among the curses of Rome, speaks with enthusiasm of the delight which was felt in the city when Statius had promised to read some fresh Sylva or new book of the Thebaid.
At length, however, even his popularity began to wane. He was defeated in the quinquennial games, and this induced him to put in execution his long-cherished design of retiring to Naples, his native city, and bidding a final adieu to the noisy but fickle plaudits of a niggardly and tasteless crowd. He hoped at Naples to enjoy, in a poverty which would be less galling when it ceased to be contrasted with so much grandeur, that domestic life for which he was eminently adapted, and of which he was deeply fond. Statius was a man of a quiet and amiable disposition; and in his private capacity, apart from the degrading accidents of his time and position, demands our honest admiration. While yet a youth, he had married a freed-woman, Claudia, to whom he was faithfully and tenderly attached. What became of Statius is unknown; he probably died in privacy at Naples, and Dodwell conjecturally places his death in the year A.D. 96. We have been unable to discover any authority whatever for the absurd stories that he was a Christian, or that he was stabbed by the emperor with an iron style.
We can only judge of the character of Statius from his own works. One or two of them are very creditable to his personal feelings; and if there are many which show him in the contemptible light of a parasite, a gossip, and a flatterer, we must remember Bacon's warning respecting the difference between vita temporis and vita hominis. But we must not deny that Statius sinks deeper still. We find him lending the ornaments of his ingenuity to the grossest excesses, and the vilest passions of patrician and imperial crime. What can we say of a poet who throws all the force of his charming versification into the Consolatio ad Flavium, and the apotheosis of a eunuch's hair? No purity or simplicity of private life can wholly atone for baseness such as this. Yet the Coma Earii is the theme of emulous raptures on the part of Martial and Statius, the two recognized poets-laureate of Domitian's court; and it is far from improbable that the necessity of rivalry in the celebration of such subjects led to that jealousy for his brother poet which critics have traced in the writings3 of the epigrammatist. Both by his envious silence and his malicious sneers, Martial shows his intolerance of "a brother near the throne."
Statius belongs to that period of declining literature in which the poets sink into mere learned versifiers. In such an age, art not only predominates over inspiration, but has entirely superseded it, and for "the sensibilities of the heart are substituted the susceptibilities of the ear." Statius and his contemporaries ("et tous ces garçon-là," as Scaliger somewhat contemptuously called them) "have taste, learning, and ingenuity, but not one spark of the true Promethean fire. They desired to be poets—they fancied themselves poets; but they rarely rise above the level of rhetoricians who wrote in rhythm. Statius teaches us nothing, is good for nothing, has no influence in the education of humanity; he sings of the tresses of a eunuch and the dead lion of an emperor, and yet he was endowed, and that in an eminent degree, with those qualities which, at certain privileged epochs, reveal to the poet truths of eternal interest, and suggest to him the utterance which renders them immortal."2
The works of Statius are—
1. The Sylva, five books of poems in various metres, and in commemoration, for the most part, of the trifling subjects of the day. Statius seems to have thought very lightly of these in comparison with his epics; and yet his claim to poetic laurels rests almost solely on these brochures, and not on his more ambitious works. Niebuhr's judgment of them was very favourable; and many of them (particularly those in which he touches on his own private affairs) are sufficiently sincere to be regarded as very interesting and agreeable compositions. They are well deserving of an attentive perusal.
2. The Thebaid, in 12 books, each of which occupied a year in elaborating, and which were frequently recited previous to their publication. They were completed before A.D. 90, as we infer from various allusions1 in the Sylva, and from the prose poems in which Statius dedicated them to his various acquaintances. It was on this work that Statius mainly founded his hope of poetic immortality.
3. The Achilleid, which is left in a fragmentary condition, and the completion of which was perhaps abandoned when the poet retired to Naples. He twice alludes to it in his Sylva.
The chief editions of Statius are—
The Editio Princeps of the Sylva, about 1470, 4to. The Editio Princeps of the Thebaid and Achilleid, folio, about the same date. Markland, Lond., 1728; Sillig, Dresden, 1827; Lemaire, Paris, 1830. Parts of Statius have been turned into English verse by Pope, Stephens, Lewis, and Howard. (F. W. F.)