The First Book of Statius his Thebais

‘The First Book of Statius his Thebais’ was published on 20 May 1712. As with many of his early poems, there is conflicting evidence about the date of composition of Pope’s translation of Statius – or rather, evidence to suggest that he revised an earlier version of the poem at a significantly later date, and over several years. Pope’s copy of Publii Papinii Statii Sylvarum libri V, Thebaidos libri XII, Achilleidos libri II, edited by Johanne Veenhusen (Leiden, 1671), now at Hartlebury Castle, is described in Mack (1982: 442, item 155). It is not annotated and the date when Pope acquired it is not known. There is, however, ample testimony to the importance of Statius as an element in Pope’s ‘great reading period . . . from about thirteen or fourteen to about twenty-one’, i.e. roughly from 1701 to 1709 (OAC, I.20, no. 44, March 1743). Late in life Pope told Spence that he had first read Statius, in a natural sequence after Ogilby’s Homer and Sandys’s Ovid, not long after he was ‘about eight years old’ in a partial translation ‘by some very bad hand’ – most probably Thomas Stephens’ 1648 An Essay upon Statius (OAC, I.14; no. 30). Mack (1985: 848) suggests that Pope encountered Statius as part of his clandestine Catholic schooling, on the grounds that it was not in the English curriculum (see also Shugrue 1957); but this earlier translation was done by a schoolmaster explicitly to help his students, and in any case Statius was hardly an obscure author (see ‘Models’ below). Pope also told Spence that it was in the course of ‘the scattererd lessons’ he used to set for himself in his early teens that he translated ‘that part of Statius which was afterwards printed with the corrections of Walsh’ – the only suggestion that Walsh, who died on 15 March 1708, had any involvement with the translation (OAC, I.14, no. 31), and perhaps a mistake for a different literary advisor such as Cromwell. Spence’s judgement reflects the relatively low standing that Statius had in the early eighteenth century:

There were some few marks besides of a mistaken taste in Mr. Pope, from that early and unguided reading of his. He met with Statius very early, liked him much, and translated a good deal from him, and to the last he used to call him the best of all the Latin epic poets after Virgil.

(OAC, I.232, no. 551, 21–25 February 1743)