Juno’s first words in the Thebaid<\/em> (1.248-51) come in reply to Jupiter’s announcement (214-47) of his plan to punish both Argives and Thebans for their various sins:<\/p>\n Sic pater omnipotens. ast illi saucia dictis <\/p>\n Her first adjective is surprisingly conciliatory and complimentary (and superlative) compared to the rest of her speech. I suspect that Statius in fact wrote mene, in<\/strong>iustissime diuum<\/em>. Once the negative prefix was lost through reduction of minims (from 6 to 3) or Christian rewriting (a pious monk might well have thought that even a pagan divine ruler of the universe deserved more respect), o<\/em> would have been the obvious metrical stopgap.<\/p>\n Of course, iustissime<\/em> can be understood as sarcastic irony,(<\/a>1<\/b><\/a>) which would arguably suit Juno’s rhetoric just as well as open insults, and the reader may well wonder what difference my conjecture makes. The answer is that it would restore (I hope) or introduce (I fear) an interesting intertext. In a tiny note in Liverpool Classical Monthly<\/em> in 1993, William Levitan suggested that the first words of the first speech in the Aeneid contain a bilingual pun: Juno’s mene in<\/strong>cepto<\/em> echo and allude to the first word of the Iliad, \u03bc\u1fc6\u03bd\u03b9\u03bd<\/strong>.(<\/a>2<\/b><\/a>) If I am right, Statius noticed Vergil’s pun and reproduced it in the first words of the first speech of Juno (the fourth in the epic) in his own Vergilian and wrath-soaked epic – a ‘window allusion’. He certainly repeated the initial mene<\/em>. He also closely modeled his preceding line, in which Statius introduces Juno’s speech (flammato uersans<\/strong> inopinum corde<\/strong> dolorem<\/em>, Th.<\/em> 1.249) on the first line after Juno’s speech in Vergil (talia flammato<\/strong> secum de corde uolutans<\/strong><\/em>, A.<\/em> 1.50).(<\/a>3<\/b><\/a>) It doesn’t seem much of a stretch to believe that he also reproduced both \u03bc\u1fc6\u03bd\u03b9\u03bd<\/strong> and mene in-<\/strong><\/em> by writing mene, in<\/strong>iustissime diuum<\/em>.<\/p>\n PDF version<\/a><\/p>\n (<\/a>1<\/b><\/a>) It might be unfair to adduce the remarks of Eduard Fraenkel (Horace<\/em>, 46n2) on “that last expedient of a despairing commentator, the assumption of ‘sarcastic irony'”: it works tolerably well here.<\/p>\n (<\/a>2<\/b><\/a>) “Give up the beginning?: Juno’s mindful wrath (Aeneid<\/em> 1.37)”, LCM<\/em> 18.1 (Jan. 1993), 14. The whole thing is one longish sentence \u2013 is that a record?<\/p>\n (<\/a>3<\/b><\/a>) So Randall T. Ganiban, Statius and Virgil: The ‘Thebaid’ and the Reinterpretation of the ‘Aeneid’<\/em>, Cambridge, 2007, 53, with further elaboration.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Juno’s first words in the Thebaid (1.248-51) come in reply to Jupiter’s announcement (214-47) of his plan to punish both Argives and Thebans for their various sins: Sic pater omnipotens. ast illi saucia dictis flammato uersans inopinum corde dolorem talia … Continue reading \n
\nflammato uersans inopinum corde dolorem
\ntalia Iuno refert: ‘mene, o iustissime diuum, 250
\nme bello certare iubes? . . .’<\/i><\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n
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