TRANSFORMING ARMA VIRVMQVE: SYNTACTICAL, MORPHOLOGICAL AND METRICAL DIS-MEMBRA-MENT IN STATIUS’ THEBAID

Abstract

Arma uirumque cano … ‘Je chante les armes et l'homme …’ ainsi commence l’Énéide, ainsi devrait commencer toute poésie.It is far from an overstatement to make the claim that in the surviving corpus of Latin poetry no phrase is more immediately identifiable than the pronouncement of the Virgilian narrator on the ‘arms and the man’ of his subject matter. The presence of arma uirumque in a particular formation cannot fail to put us in mind of the Aeneid and its concomitant ideological associations. A consequence of the epic's centrality as a canonical text was the emergence in antiquity of arma uirumque as a synecdochic quotation for the work as a whole and, as such, for the figure of the poet himself. This transformation was further actuated by the ancient practice of ascribing titular authority to a poem's incipit, ensuring that arms and the man took on especial resonance. Even within the Aeneid, self-referential intratextual play with the Virgilian utterance can be detected. Furthermore, in post-Augustan verse, Fowler argues that arma alone is always loaded in a metaliterary fashion, serving as an identifying marker for Virgil's epic or, more broadly, for epic in general. This was so marked a phenomenon that the opening word of the poem was recycled and reworked by Ovid around a decade after the compositional beginnings of the Aeneid, in the first book of the Amores, in what formed an announcement of the redeployment of epic arma into the elegiac world of militia amoris (Am. 1.1–2).