Copyright by Thomas James Bolt 2019
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Copyright by Thomas James Bolt 2019 The Dissertation Committee for Thomas James Bolt Certifies that this is the approved version of the following Dissertation: Delusions of Grandeur: Humor, Genre, and Aesthetics in the Poetry of Statius Committee: Pramit Chaudhuri, Supervisor Neil Coffee Ayelet Haimson Lushkov Alison Keith Andrew Riggsby Delusions of Grandeur: Humor, Genre, and Aesthetics in the Poetry of Statius by Thomas James Bolt Dissertation Presented to the Faculty of the Graduate School of The University of Texas at Austin in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree of Doctor of Philosophy The University of Texas at Austin August 2019 Dedication To my parents Acknowledgements I have been fortunate enough to have received support from many sources to whom I am forever grateful. First thanks must go to my supervisor, Pramit Chaudhuri. His patience, guidance, and keen eye for detail have been essential for the successful completion of this project. Each word in this dissertation has benefitted from his thoughtful consideration. He has consistently challenged me to think about literature in more creative and deeper ways, and this dissertation — to say nothing of my scholarly perspective as a whole — is much the better for it. I also thank Ayelet Haimson Lushkov. Apart from her characteristically insightful commentary on this project, I will always be thankful that she took me under her wing while I was a first-year graduate student and assured me that it was, in fact, okay to become a Latinist. Andrew Riggsby, Alison Keith, and Neil Coffee provided invaluable insights and feedback on this project. I thank each of them for their generosity and their incisive comments from which this dissertation has greatly benefitted. I have been fortunate to have had many outstanding professors throughout my academic career at the University of Texas at Austin, the University of Oxford, and Lafayette College. I would like to thank but two here. I will be forever grateful to Markus Dubischar for instilling in me a love for the ancient world and to Matthew Leigh for instilling in me a love of Latin literature. Both have been sources of inspiration and unflagging support over the years. I would also like to thank the faculty, staff, and fellow graduate students at the University of Texas at Austin for their help and support. In particular, I want to thank Beth Chichester, whose generosity knows no bounds. Furthermore, I thank the Department of Classics and Graduate School at the University of Texas at Austin for fellowship support during the Fall 2017 semester and numerous travel grants. Additionally, I thank the Andrew W. Mellon Engaged Scholar Initiative for generous financial support in the summers of 2017, 2018, and 2019 as well as the 2018/2019 academic year. v Lizzy Adams, with whom I have had the good fortune to share an office for numerous years, deserves special mention. It is not an overstatement to say that every good idea in this dissertation has been improved by her thoughtful consideration and acute sense of detail. I thank her for tolerating countless hours of musings and, more importantly, for her friendship and enormous support over the last five years in Austin. I lack the words to express the deepest debts adequately. This dissertation, not to mention my pursuit of higher education at all, would have been impossible without the unconditional love and support of my parents, Mark and Janet Bolt. Words are not enough to convey my love and appreciation. Lastly, I want to express deep gratitude to Javier Escobedo, whose love and support sustained me through the toughest times in writing this dissertation. Without him, the journey to the end of this project, if it had happened at all, would have been tougher, less enjoyable, and less meaningful. I thank him for always believing in me and for supporting me in every way imaginable. vi Abstract Delusions of Grandeur: Humor, Genre, and Aesthetics in the Poetry of Statius Thomas James Bolt, Ph.D. The University of Texas at Austin, 2019 Supervisor: Pramit Chaudhuri In this dissertation, I examine humor in Roman literature with a focus on Statius’ Thebaid, Achilleid, and Silvae. I demonstrate that humor is a prevalent feature of Statius’ poetry and takes forms ranging from humorous irony to hyperbolic parody of epic conventions. By instilling humor in his poetic program, Statius challenges several central facets of epic, such as its aesthetic grandeur and lofty idiom; at the same time, he revitalizes and complicates notions about epic’s generic totalizing impulse. What emerges from Statius’ poetry is an aesthetic that embraces polyvalent and diverse registers as well as complex interactions between the humorous and serious tones that both vie for attention. In the Introduction and Chapter 1, I outline the problems, theoretical and practical, that humor presents an epic poet. I then sketch out definitions and methodology before analyzing salient examples of humorous irony and wordplay in the Thebaid and Achilleid so as to show humor’s variety and breadth in the Statian epics. In Chapter 2, I turn to satire, the quintessential humorous hexameter genre. I argue that the tight interrelationship of the epic and satiric traditions allows Statius to take humorous literary strategies from satire and employ them in epic with ease. In Chapter 3, I investigate one of these strategies, parodic quotation, and argue that vii Statius employs it to render his epic contemporaries and the canon absurd through humorous de- and re-contextualization. In Chapter 4, I consider Statius’ use of the sublime, an influential ancient aesthetic concept. I demonstrate that Statius consistently renders sublimity humorous, thus destabilizing the sublime’s straightforward loftiness and complicating ideas of epic grandeur. By way of conclusion, I consider the political realities of literary humor in the late first century CE through analysis of the Silvae, a collection whose associations with contemporary politics are overt, before briefly reflecting on the legacy of humor in the broader epic tradition. viii Table of Contents Introduction ..........................................................................................................................1 1: Humor in Roman Epic ............................................................................................6 2: Totalizing vs. Essential Epic.................................................................................10 3: Humor in Classics .................................................................................................13 4: Definitions ............................................................................................................18 5: Statius' Humor ......................................................................................................22 6: Chapter Overview .................................................................................................30 Chapter 1: Deocrum and Genre in Statian Epic .................................................................33 Introduction: Aristotle and Literary Decorum ..........................................................33 1: Genre and Humor in Roman Poetry .....................................................................38 2: Humor in Statian Epic: Irony and Wordplay ........................................................49 3: Conclusions...........................................................................................................72 Chapter 2: Epic and Satire ................................................................................................73 Introduction: Hexameter and Humor ........................................................................73 1: Epic and Satire: Theory and Practice ....................................................................73 2: The Thebaid's Concilium Deorum ........................................................................88 3: Conclusions...........................................................................................................94 Chapter 3: Parody and Intertext .........................................................................................96 Introduction: Intertextual Theory ..............................................................................96 1: Centos and Bidirectional Intertextuality ...............................................................97 2: Parodic Intertext in Statius..................................................................................104 3: Conclusions.........................................................................................................120 ix Chapter 4: The Sublime ...................................................................................................121 Introduction: Literary Taste in the Early Imperial Period ......................................121 1: The Longinian Sublime ......................................................................................124 2: The Sublime and Hyperbole ...............................................................................132 3: The Non-Sublime................................................................................................136 4: The Construction of the Sublime in Statius' Thebaid .........................................143 5: Conclusions.........................................................................................................170 Appendix: Roman Vocabulary of the Sublime .......................................................172