The Guilt of Cadmus the Farmer in Statius’ Thebaid

Abstract

Statius’ Thebaid inverts the traditional positive reading of agricultural work. In the account of the founding moments of Thebes, the poet remains faithful to what is documented in the extant Greek and Roman literary material. However, as this article argues, Statius introduces two significant innovations with respect to his thematic precedents. First, Cadmus the founder is explicitly and emphatically pointed out as guilty of the internecine struggle that results from his farming. Second, he does not limit himself to sowing the soil but, previously, he plows it. The ploughing motif, although pivotal in the myth of Jason's trials in Cholchis, only appears referred to Cadmus in Ovid's Metamorphoses (3.104–5), albeit in a very succinct form. As will be examined, Statius amplifies the Ovidian suggestion, programmatically conferring negative connotations to this motif (tillage, bull, yoke, furrow, etc.) throughout his epic. Cadmus’ ill-fated tillage is unambiguously presented as the origin of the curse of Thebes and as the root cause of the present fratricidal war between Eteocles and Polynices. The dire fruits which agricultural labour invariably produces in the Cadmean farmlands echo Lucanean Thessalian fields from whose furrows, contaminated by the blood of Roman combatants, grow polluted crops. The blame that Statius places on the shoulders of Cadmus the farmer, the relationship he establishes between farming and fratricidal war, and his insistence on the perverse effects of agricultural work transform mythic Thebes into an exemplar of fratricidal Rome as apt as Lucan's historical Thessaly.