Reviewed by: The Search for the Self in Statius' Thebaid: Identity, Intertext and the Sublime by Jean-Michel Hulls Michael Dewar The Search for the Self in Statius' Thebaid: Identity, Intertext and the Sublime. By Jean-Michel Hulls. Berlin and Boston: De Gruyter (Trends in Classics 116). 2021. Pp. xlv, 275. The title of this book is admirably clear and informative, and the three nouns in the subtitle provide a good guide to the preoccupations of the analysis offered. Readers should, however, prepare themselves for an introduction that some will consider enlightening, others will regard as ill-suited to the subject, and most will find complex but stimulating. "Statius' Thebaid," Hulls declares as he rolls up his sleeves, "is a poem about identity" and "a work obsessed with its own identity, status and belated place within the literary canon" (xi). So far, so good: the ideas and the language alike are conventional enough to slip down easily. And yet the search for the self will not always demand so little effort on the part of the seekers. Indeed, by the time it is nearing its end they will be expected to take in their stride such uncompromising formulations as "[t]he poet construes his own subjectivity out of his pre-ontological, discursive power of negativity" (202). The introduction (xiâxlv) establishes the theoretical framework of the study, freely acknowledges the difficulties of fitting any Roman poet into it, and explains how these difficulties may nonetheless be circumvented. The argument is grounded in modern theories regarding the construction of identity; the principal difficulty is that no Roman poet could think of, let alone speak of, identity in the terms employed by the authors of those theories; and the workaround lies in the realisation that Statius can be understood as grappling with much the same ideas about identity as they do, while using the literary conventions of rhetoric and genre to show his characters grappling in their turn with the construction of their own sense of self. That is, it is Hulls's "contention that, whilst hampered by its entirely objectivist baggage, the Thebaid does something similar by looking at the ways in which his overdetermined characters attempt, and frequently fail, to enter new fields of culture and subjectivity within the poem" (xxxiii). One might reject this contention on the grounds that it is too anachronistic to allow a truly satisfying account of a Roman poem as an artefact of Roman culture, and that we would do better to work with those conventions while using tools familiar to Roman poets, not least Roman philosophy and political thought. Yet the sceptical will find much of interest here. Hulls's analysis of individual characters frequently enrichesâor, if you prefer, complicatesâthose to be found in earlier critical literature on the Thebaid. He starts off impressively, with an insightful reading of Polynices' journey from Thebes [End Page 162] to Argos and of his inability to achieve the realisation of his character as an individual separate from his twin and as a husband, a father, or a citizen of his new city. This adds welcome depth to the shame readers usually detect in Polynices' words when he identifies himself to Adrastus by naming his ancestor, his homeland, and his mother rather than by giving his own name (Theb. 1.680â681); "[t]he Theban exile may simply be incapable of saying who he is" (16). Similarly, a later chapter offers a persuasive study of, in particular, Eteocles and Creon as tyrants who are presented in accordance with the literary tyrant's traditional character traits, but who turn out to be almost comically ineffective in the role ("Yet no one is fooled; both Tydeus and Maeon see through Eteocles . . . . As a tyrant, Eteocles is something of a flop," 83). More ambitious than any of this is Hulls's analysis of the Thebaid as a metapoetic exploration of the poet's own search for a secure identity and position in the epic canon. There is no space here even for a summary that would do justice to the intricate arguments offered. The two principal lines...