In discussing the treatment of psychology (or ethics) in Roman creative literature it is not always easy to reconcile the approach of philosophers, whose primary interest is in the reception of Hellenistic ethics and psychology, with that of literary interpreters who start, as I do, from the desire to understand the motivation of a poetic text. Previous work on Senecan tragedy and Lucan has made me sceptical of claims for a primarily ethical and specifically Stoic motivation of their tragedy and epic: instead, their characterisation appears to me rooted in the psychology of the poetic tradition and the ethics of a Roman cultural code that was only partly affected by Stoicism. However, even without positing a Stoic purpose, the student of Lucan and Seneca must recognise that Stoic conceptions of the human mind and human behaviour contributed to the way in which both poets retell both myth and history.

This chapter focuses on Statius' Thebaid, a work written a generation after Seneca and Lucan and clearly reflecting their influence. Statius himself came from a different milieu from that of the Annaei, more Hellenic, and at the same time more concerned with professional technique and the literariness of poetry.