Abstract EN:

Born in Naples of a Grammaticus, a laureate in the Greek games, for a father, Statius was a real transplant of Greek education into Latin literature. To the latter he brought, apart from Hellenic culture, a thorough grounding in poetic theory and techniques, that enabled him to embed himself in the Latin tradition. At ease in high society, which he celebrated by minor works (silvae), he set out to establish himself, along with homer, Virgil, Lucan, on the summit of poetry, by making of his thebaid a fluvial aeneid, full of echoes from the great preceding poets, from homer to his contemporaries. Using for framework euripi dean tragedies, he rivaled his predecessors in an unusual fashion, without being afraid to point out, sometimes explicitly, to whom he pretends to leave up to - or even to surpass. Setting out epos on a new path, he incorporated gallimachus, the lyric poets, ovid. His conceptions are those of Seneca, his inspiration is defined as sublime. The world appears in chaos where human passions contest, mysterious- ly conducted by successive interventions of the gods, in the four triads of the thebaid. Jupiter, supreme, manages the crisis from the beginning to the end, a crisis which exactly corresponds to the unfolding of the epos. Like homer, according to Aristotle, he wanted to join to his great opus an "ethical" epos, i. E. Achilleid that he left incomplete.