2. The editions of the Siluae used are Coleman, K.M., Statius Siluae IV (Oxford 1988; repr. Bristol 1998)Google Scholar and Vollmer, F. (ed. and comm.), P. Papinius Statius Silvarum Libri (Leipzig 1898Google Scholar, repr. Hildesheim and New York 1971). I take the servants to be dressed as Ceres and Bacchus by analogy with the Ganymedes in the stands of 1.6. The reference to Ceres and Bacchus serving at a thousand tables is, I believe, glossed a few lines later, when Statius says he did not pay attention to the squadrons of servants because Domitian commanded all of his attention (4.2.38–40). Coleman ad loc., however, takes this reference more metaphorically to refer to bread and wine, the gifts of Demeter and Bacchus.

3. Gowers, E., The Loaded Table (Oxford 1993), 26Google Scholar.

4. The Romans linked Saturnus with saturo, to fill (Cic. ND 2.64, which also etymologises the Greek Kronos.- Saturnus autem est appellatus quod saturetur annis). See O’Hara, J., True Names: Vergil and the Alexandrian Tradition of Etymologizing Wordplay (Ann Arbor 1993), 68, 109, 163Google Scholar for Vergilian wordplay linking Saturnian Juno with insatiability (wordplay kat’ antiphrasin), as well as with the verb sero, satus, to sow (Varro LL. 5.64; see O’Hara, 270, for other citations).

5. Newmyer, S.T., The Silvae of Statius: Structure and Theme (Leiden 1979), 111Google Scholar.

6. Gowers (n.3 above), 28.

7. This opening sequence curiously resembles the opening of Silvae 2.7—also in hendecasyllabics, also the final poem of its book, also an occasional poem celebrating a particular day (in this case, the dead poet Lucan’s birthday). There Statius summons a series of deities (Mercury, Bacchus, Apollo and the Muses) to celebrate Lucan’s birthday feast, but then demands silence from the Muses. In 1.6.4 he describes Saturn as compede exsoluta, ‘freed from his fetters’, while in 2.7 he describes Lucan as expert in the twin arts of prose and poetry (et uinctae pede uocis et solutae, 2.7.22). Newmyer (n.5 above, 56f.) points out that hendecasyllabics are rare in the Siluae and are used to mark the end of a structural unit: they occur in 1.6 and 2.7 to mark the end of their respective books, and in 4.3, which is the last in a series of three poems about the emperor, and thus marks the series as a complete group.

8. Gowers (n.3 above), 27, for further references to Saturaalian tricks and puns.

9. Kyle, D.G., Spectacles of Death in Ancient Rome (London and New York 1998), 191Google Scholar, for a description of the sparsio.

10. Cato the Elder provides a recipe for mustaceos: ‘Moisten one modius of wheat flour with must; add anise, cumin, 2 lbs. lard, 1 lb. of cheese, and the bark of a laurel twig. When you have made them into cakes, put bay leaves under them and bake’ (Cato RR 121, tr. Hooper). Varro comments that dates (caryotes) will bear fruit in Judea but not in Italy (RR 2.1.27).

11. Caueat lector: the following discussion is tentative and based on a reading, gaioli, that is an emendation—even worse, an emendation that is unattested elsewhere. If this discussion is persuasive, it might offer some support to the emendation, but given the state of the text, it must remain speculative.

12. I take him to be a short person for two reasons: first, he seems, from Martial’s comment that he almost makes a third, to be smaller than a normal human, and second, his name appears to be an obvious pun on nanus, dwarf.

13. The quantities of the first syllables of Lucius and luculentuli are not the same, but differences in vowel quantity did not prevent the Romans from etymologising and punning. See O’Hara (n.4 above), 61f.; Ahl, F.M., Metaformations: Soundplay and Wordplay in Ovid and Other Classical Poets (Ithaca 1985)Google Scholar, esp. ch.1.

14. Martial 8.33.11 and 13.27.1.

15. Rowland, I. and Howe, T.N., Vitruvius: Ten Books on Architecture (New York 1999)Google Scholar. As they point out (136), it is probable that not all caryatids signified captive women in antiquity: ‘Vitruvius’s aetiology postdates the earliest caryatids by a century.’ The statues of the Erechtheum were probably known merely as korai. Another potential source for the Caryatid statue type is the dance of the maidens at the Spartan festival of Artemis Caryatidis. Nevertheless, by Vitruvius’s time the conflation of caryatid types had evidently taken place. Rowland and Howe (ibid.) note ‘[t]he extent to which these erudite meanings were broadly received and understood is debatable.’ See Rykwert, J., The Dancing Column (Boston 1996)Google Scholar; Plommer, H., ‘Vitruvius and the Origin of the Caryatids’, JHS 99 (1979), 97–102CrossRefGoogle Scholar, for the dancing Caryatids; Zanker, P., The Power of Images in the Age of Augustus (Ann Arbor 1988), 256fGoogle Scholar., on the Caryatids, replicating those in the Erechtheum, in the colonnade of the Forum of Augustus.

16. Antiqui louis will call to mind not only Saturn, Jupiter's father and predecessor, but also Vespasian, Domitian’s father.

17. Gowers (n.3 above), 18–22.

18. See Benton, C., ‘Split Vision: The Politics of the Gaze in Seneca’s Troades’, in D. Fredrick (ed.), The Roman Gaze: Vision, Power, and the Body in Ancient Rome (Baltimore, forthcoming October 2002)Google Scholar.

19. See Coleman, K.M., ‘Fatal Charades: Roman Executions Staged as Mythological Enactments’, JRS 80 (1990), 44–73Google Scholar, for the occasional practice of staging executions as performances of myths.

20. See Markus, D., The Politics of Entertainment: Tradition and Romanization in Statius’ The-baid (Diss. Michigan 1997), 130Google Scholar, on representations of Virtus as an Amazon in imperial processions on public monuments, especially associated with Domitian.

21. There are many points of resemblance between a Roman triumph and a munus. Both reflect the overwhelming importance of military values to the Roman state; both involve spectacular display to the public at large, involving lavish tableaux, often organised around mythological subjects, props and costumes; both perform Roman domination on a vast civic stage; indeed, the games on occasion included massive re-enactments of Roman victories.

22. Garland, R., The Eye of the Beholder: Deformity and Disability in the Ancient World (London 1995Google Scholar) has a discussion of the popularity of dwarfs and pygmies in the Roman world.

23. An anonymous reader supplies a reference to Daviault, A., Lancha, J., and Lopez-Palomo, L.A., Un mosaico con inscripciones: Puente Gentil, Cordoba (Madrid 1987)Google Scholar, which may contain the suggestion that a mosaic of the pygmies and cranes was meant to represent a mime. I have not been able to consult this work. Cf. Kirk, G.S., The Iliad: A Commentary (Cambridge 1985)CrossRefGoogle Scholar on Il. 3.2–6; Harrison, S.J., Vergil: Aeneid 10 (Oxford 1997)Google Scholarad Aen. 10.264–66; Mynors, R.A.B. (ed. and comm.), Virgil: Georgics (Oxford 1990)Google Scholarad Geo. 1.118–122.

24. The two translations contradict one another, and in that sense, both cannot be right. However, the mechanism of punning relies on more than one meaning of a word being activated simultaneously. Mozley’s Loeb translation (Mozley, J.H., Statius I: Silvae, Thebaid I-IV, New York and London 1928Google Scholar) is perfectly coherent, though he gives no indication what booty he thinks the cranes are ‘waiting to swoop on’.

25. The verbs Statius uses for the exchange of blows in combat are, perhaps, a punning prelude to the poor pygmies’ second act: eduntuulnera conseruntque dextras. Edo, ‘to give out’, and consero, ‘to join together’, each has a verbal ‘look-alike’ from unrelated roots: edunt from edo, edi, ‘to eat’; conserunt from consero, conseui, ‘to plant’. Eating and sowing recall the Saturnalian themes of abundance and consumption that dominated the first part of the poem; the combat is a variation upon the Saturnalian feast.

26. It could, of course, be the pygmies themselves who are described as uagis rapinis, but the birds are the obvious referents.

27. See Vollmer ad loc. for a discussion of the birds distributed in this sparsio. Statius himself mentions cranes and pheasants as expensive gourmet items at Silu. 4.6.9, no doubt alluding to Horace Sat. 2.8.86 (cf. n.30 below). Varro mentions the rarity and expense of meleagrides at RR 3.9. Suetonius, Cal. 22, lists guinea hens, pheasants and flamingoes among the birds that Caligula, in an unusual example of purely avian sacrifice, had offered to himself in his own cult.

28. Flamingoes, the other educated guess at what the Nile bird might be, would be no easier to handle.

29. Kyle (n.9 above), esp. ch. 6, ‘Arenas and Eating.’

30. Cf. Gowers’s discussion (n.3 above, 176f.) of another literary meal with cannibalistic overtones, Horace’s Sat. 2.8, esp. lines 85–91, which describe a huge platter containing the dismembered limbs of a crane, goose liver, ripped off shoulders of hares, and ‘Amazonian’ blackbirds (mazonomo) with their breasts burnt off.

31. longo post tempore, 4.2.64. See Coleman (n.2 above) ad loc. for a discussion of what this means in terms of the chronology of the Siluae and attempts to reconstruct Statius’ career.

32. This inability is, of course, a typical pose on the part of poets; Statius deploys it most notably in the recusatio in Theb. 1.

33. Newlands, C., ‘Horace and Statius at Tibur: An Interpretation of Silvae 1.3’, ICS 13 (1988), 95–111Google Scholar.

34. Gowers (n.3 above), 43.

35. There is a persistent emphasis in the text on the poet’s need to sing for his supper as well as on the status attained by poets who sing at supper: intulit carries a connotation of trade, as if Vergil were importing Aeneas as a kind of foreign luxury good; the verb consumpsit used of Homer suggests that the tale of Odysseus is some kind of currency to be spent, and Statius is overtly anxious about providing proper recompense for his dinner invitation. Markus (n.20 above) discusses Statius’ dependence on patronage; see also Hardie, A., Statius and the Silvae: Poets, Patrons, and Epideixìs in the Graeco-Roman World (Liverpool 1983)Google Scholar; White, P., ‘The Friends of Martial, Statius, and Pliny, and the Dispersal of Patronage’, HSCP 79 (1975), 265–300Google Scholar, and ‘Amicitia and the Profession of Poetry in Early Imperial Rome’, JRS 68 (1978), 74–92Google Scholar; and Malamud, M., ‘Out of Circulation? An Essay on Exchange in Persius’ Satires’, Ramus 25 (1996), 39–64CrossRefGoogle Scholar, for poem as exchange in the Neronian satirist Persius.

36. Gordon, P., ‘Phaeacian Dido: Lost Pleasures of an Epicurean Intertext?’, CA. 17 (1998), 188–211Google Scholar. The Epicurean philosopher and poet Philodemus, on the other hand, writes admiringly of Phaeacia, testifying to another, more positive tradition about the Phaeacians.

37. Gordon (n.36 above), 209.

38. The first mention of food in this poem about a feast is couched in the form of a question about protocol: datur ac iuxta, datur ora tueri/uina inter mensasque, et non assurgere fas est? ‘Is it granted to me to look at this face nearby, amid the drinks and tables, and is it right not to stand?’ There is also a description of Ceres and Bacchus waiting on the thousands of guests (4.2.32–35), but no mention of the food provided; the emphasis is on the expenditure and the fanciful costumes of the servants.

39. The theme of the poem or poems that won Statius the victory at the Alban Games was Domitian's military actions against the Dacians and the Germans. Curiously, these are among the subjects Statius says in Thebaid 1 that he is unable to treat adequately.

40. E.g. Horace Sat. 2.8, on the banquet hosted by the unfortunate Nasidienus. The topos is well analysed by Gowers (n.3 above).

41. See Coleman (n.2 above), 101f., for a discussion of the dating of Statius’ winning the Alban games.

42. Braund, S.M. and James, P., ‘Quasi Homo: Distortion and Contortion in Seneca’s Apocolo-cyntosis’, Arethusa 31 (1998), 285–312CrossRefGoogle Scholar, at 288. See also Garland (n.22 above) on the emperor as freak, and Versnel, H.S., ‘Two Carnivalesque Princes: Augustus and Claudius and me Ambiguity of Saturnalian Imagery’, in S. Döpp (ed.), Karnevaleske Phaenomene in antiken und nachantiken Kulturen und Literaturen (Trier 1993), 99–122Google Scholar. Nauta, R., ‘Seneca’s Apocolocyntosis as Saturnalian Literature’, Mnemosyne 40 (1987), 69–96CrossRefGoogle Scholar, thoroughly analyses the Saturnalian aspects of the Apocolocyntosis.

43. See the discussion in Versnel, H.S., Inconsistencies in Greek and Roman Religion, 2 vols. (Leiden & New York 1990–93), ii.208fGoogle Scholar.

44. Malamud, M., ‘Happy Birthday, Dead Lucan: (P)raising the Dead in Silvae 2.7’, in A.J. Boyle (ed.), Roman Literature and Ideology: Ramus Essays for J.P. Sullivan (Bendigo 1995), 169–98Google Scholar.

45. Though Statius presents himself in the prefaces to the Siluae as writing spontaneous occasional poems, the Siluae are, as Hardie (n.35 above) has shown, highly crafted poems which he edited and arranged. I don’t see any reason to rule out the possibility that he would ‘seal’ a book unit with a sphragis poem.

46. Markus (n.20 above), 39.

47. Penwill, J., ‘Quintilian, Statius, and the Lost Epic of Domitian,’ Ramus 29 (2000), 60–83CrossRefGoogle Scholar, esp. 72; Benker, M., Achill und Domitian: Herrscherkritik in der Achilleis des Statius, Diss. Friedrich-Alexander-Universitat (Erlangen-Nurnberg 1987)Google Scholar.

48. Markus, D., ‘Performing the Book: The Recital of Epic in First-Century C.E. Rome’, CA 19 (2000), 138–79Google Scholar, at 174, commenting on Statius’ presentation of his work as a munus in the Siluae, puts it somewhat differently: ‘Contrary to Juvenal’s sketch of Statius as the successful, but unrewarded public performer before a broad audience (uolgus), Statius advertises the popularity of his work through a careful choice of audiences (patres, Itala iuuentus, the emperor), and represents his recitals as a spectacle offered in a gesture of aristocratic generosity (munus). These conflicting representations illustrate how the epic recital becomes the focal point of concerns about social hierarchy and status as do other stage performances in Rome.’

49. Statius is well acquainted with the topos of the poetic crown: in Horace Odes 3.30, to which Statius alludes at the end of 1.6, Horace asks the Muse Melpomene to crown him; Siluae 4.2, a poem about dining with Domitian, concludes with a memory of Domitian crowning Statius with gold for his victory at the Alban Games. In Siluae 1.2.228, the poet Stella receives a double crown: a wreath of laurel from Apollo, and the Minoa corona, crown of Ariadne, from Bacchus. Vollmer and Mozley ad loc. gloss this as an ivy crown, but Vollmer also cites Theon on Aratus Phaen. 71, who says that Dionysus put his ivy crown in the heavens after Ariadne’s death.

50. Damon, C., ‘Statius’ Silvae 4.9: Libertas Decembris?’ ICS 17 (1992), 301–08Google Scholar, discusses the Saturnalian features of this poem, and argues that it subtly flatters its recipient, Plotius Grypus, and uses shared vocabulary with Catullus 14, 44 and 50, in which friendship and literary aesthetics are closely intertwined.

51. Ovid Fasti MIA uses libellus to mean one book of the Fasti: cum…suofinem mense libellus habet.

52. Paired, interestingly, with Caricae, Carian figs—close in sound to Caryotides. Also linking 1.6 and 4.9 is the notion of a joke that has gone on too long: cf. 4.9.5f.

53. Coleman (n.2 above) sees the point of the joke being Brutus’ boring style, citing among others Cicero Oral. 110 on its monotony, and Tacitus, quoting Cicero, calling him otiosum atque diiunctum (Dial. 18.5). Damon (n.50 above) argues instead that the allusion to Brutus, who was paired with Lieinius Calvus as stylistic opposites to Cicero, may actually be meant to draw attention to Grypus' stylistic purity.

54. An alternative aetiology for the Caryatids, as noted above, is from the dancing maidens at the temple of Artemis Caryatidis in Sparta. This too would fit in with Statius’ punning identification of his book: Thebais as dancing girl would form an ironic counterpart to the dancing girls brought out for the audience's amusement in Domitian's munus.

55. Bartsch, S., Actors inthe Audience: Theatricality and Doublespeak from Nero to Hadrian (Cambridge MA 1994), 131–33CrossRefGoogle Scholar, has a good discussion of the problems of interpreting this passage and of Juvenal’s portrayal of Statius, with extensive bibliography. For further discussion, see W.C.|Helmbold and O’Neil, E.N., ‘The Form and Purpose of Juvenal’s Seventh Satire’, CP 54 (1959), 100–08Google Scholar; Hardie (n.3 above), 61; Braund, S.M., Beyond Anger: A Study of Juvenal’s Third Book of Satires (Cambridge 1988), 60Google Scholar; Tandoi, V., ‘II ricordo di Stazio “dolce poeta” nella sat. VII di Giovenale’, Maia 21 (1969), 103–22Google Scholar; Wiesen, D.S., ‘Juvenal and the Intellectuals’, Hermes 101 (1973), 477–78Google Scholar; and Orentzel, A.E., ‘Juvenal and Statius’, CB 52 (1976), 61fGoogle Scholar.

56. See McGuire, D., Acts of Silence: Civil War, Tyranny, and Suicide in the Flavian Epics (Tubingen 1997), 240–42Google Scholar.

57. The notion of Statius as a ‘second-rater’ is discussed by Hinds, S., Allusion and Intertext: Dynamics of Appropriation in Roman Poetry (Cambridge 1998)Google Scholar, ch.3.

58. latente palma means that the dates are falling, as it were, from invisible trees, as Vollmer notes ad loc. My suggestion here is that there is another, punning, level of meaning. D. McGuire reminds me that latente is a particularly appropriate verb for a Saturnalian poem, since Latium was thought to derive its name from the fact that Saturn hid there after escaping from his chains (see Ov. F. 1.237f.: dicta quoque est Latium terra, latente deo; Verg. Aen. 8.319–27; Serv. ad Aen. 8.322; cf. O’Hara [n.4 above], 45 and 207f, for a collection of etymologies of Latium).