Scripta Imagine : Buildings, Transformations, and Rhetorical Ekphrasis in Statius’ Silvae

Sammanfattning: Statius’ Silvae, his collected epideictic poems in five volumes, have long been recognised as a descriptive tour-de-force, with its extensive depictions of buildings, people, and art. Modern critical responses to these have been varied, identifying a wide variety of influences and stylistic tendencies in these works. This thesis takes six poems notable for their focus on structures and examines the ways in which their unusual descriptive tendencies reflect first-century AD thought about ekphrasis, panegyric, and poetry. The poems in question are Silvae 1.1 about an equestrian statue of Domitian, Silvae 1.3 about the villa of Manilius Vopicus, Silvae 1.5 about the baths owned by Claudius Etruscus, Silvae 2.2 about the villa of Pollius Felix at Sorrento, Silvae 3.1 about the building of a temple to Hercules, and Silvae 4.3 about the new road connecting Naples to the Via Appia. Each of these poems describes a structure with reference to how it was built or the materials used in its construction. These poems represent the first time in Roman literature that such details have been extensively described, but they anticipate later traditions of elaborate description in their choices of subject and style.This thesis examines these poems in the light of first century AD understanding of ekphrasis, an educational term used for a passage of extended description. It argues that there is evidence that this is a widely understood concept in this period and that this concept underpins the use of building description in the Silvae. If these sections can be labelled as ekphrastic, their role in the poems overall can be seen as parallel to similar descriptions in rhetorical panegyric in that they provide evidence to support the praise of the poems’ dedicatees. Furthermore, the status of these passages as ekphrasis suggests connections to similarly descriptive texts which serve to re-contextualise the actions of the dedicatees as epic, divine, or world-changing acts. This is all done through the close emphasis on the viewed experience of the narrator whose viewing provides a model for the reader of the text.