The Patron’s Image

Abstract

While the technique of lauding a patron by praising his art is implicit in earlier chapters, this chapter explores the first extant Latin poetry in which it is explicit: the occasional verse of Statius and Martial written under the Flavian emperor Domitian. The two poets’ subjection to their patrons, expressed in poetry that calls particular attention to the latter’s philhellenism, problematizes still further the idea of a text’s struggle for dominance over its image. Mitchell’s notion of ecphrasis as a “gift” to a third party cannot fully account for the way these ecphrases become pointed and self-conscious counter-gifts, elusively objectifying the process through which the patron’s identity becomes that of the poet and vice-versa. Part I of the chapter treats Statius’s Silvae 1.1, on a massive equestrian statue of Domitian, together with Martial’s epigrams on a statue of Hercules with Domitian’s features. Part II turns to the more private circumstances of the two authors’ poems on a purportedly Lysippan statuette of Hercules owned by Novius Vindex. This chapter complements chapter 4’s discussion of religious statuary by illustrating how the numinous power within statues of divinities might become subject to the divinity of the Roman emperor himself.