Who He Is
Statius is the Latin poet whom the mountain makes tremble. He appears on the fifth turn, behind Dante and Virgil, as Christ appeared to the two on the road, according to Luke, already risen from the tomb: he speaks before being seen and wishes peace. He had lain in the penalty for more than five hundred years, and the earthquake and the praise of the souls are the sign that he has just felt the will to rise free. He presents himself by name and by time, in the time of the good Titus, the name that lasts longest and honors most, and at once limits himself: famous, but still without faith. Sweet was his vocal spirit, and Rome drew him, where he deserved to crown his temples with myrtle; he sang of Thebes and then of great Achilles, but he fell on the road with the second load. The flame that warmed his ardor came from the Aeneid, which was his mother and his nurse. With him the poem shows the reverse of Virgil's Limbo: a poet whom the world held to be pagan and who rises, because he was secretly baptized, and who credits his rising to a verse of the other. For the rest of the canticle he is the third walker and the explainer of what Virgil's reason no longer reaches, the generation of the soul, which the guide hands over to him in Canto XXV.
Trajectory
Canto XXI of Purgatory opens with Dante's thirst and the shade that answers it. Statius comes up behind, looking at the souls lying down, and wishes peace; Virgil answers with a wish and shows him the signs the angel marked on Dante. He asks why the mountain trembled, and Statius answers with an explanation that is a rule of the place: nothing there is out of order, the mountain is free of all alteration, and it trembles only when a soul feels itself cleansed and rises to climb. The proof is the will, and he tells his own case:
E io, che son giaciuto a questa doglia / cinquecent’ anni e più, pur mo sentii / libera volontà di miglior soglia: / però sentisti il tremoto e li pii / spiriti per lo monte render lode / a quel Segnor, che tosto sù li ’nvii, And I, who have lain in this pain five hundred years and more, only now felt free will of a better threshold: therefore you felt the earthquake and the pious spirits on the mountain giving praise to that Lord, who soon sends them up.
Virgil asks who he was, and Statius gives the time and the name, with a qualification:
Nel tempo che ’l buon Tito, con l’aiuto / del sommo rege, vendicò le fóra / ond’ uscì ’l sangue per Giuda venduto, / col nome che più dura e più onora / era io di là», rispuose quello spirto, / «famoso assai, ma non con fede ancora, In the time when the good Titus, with the help of the supreme King, avenged the wounds from which the blood came that was sold by Judas, with the name that lasts longest and honors most, I was there, answered that spirit, famous enough, but not yet with faith.
His most intimate confession is his debt:
de l’Eneïda dico, la qual mamma / fummi, e fummi nutrice, poetando: / sanz’ essa non fermai peso di dramma. / E per esser vivuto di là quando / visse Virgilio, assentirei un sole / più che non deggio al mio uscir di bando, I mean the Aeneid, which was a mother to me and a nurse, in my poetry: without it I would not have set a drachma's weight. And for having lived there when Virgil lived, I would grant one more sun than I owe to my exit from exile.
Dante cannot hold back his laughter, Statius asks him about it, and then Dante says that the one who guides his eyes is the Virgil from whom Statius took the strength to sing. Statius bends to embrace the master's feet, and the master stops him:
Frate, / non far, ché tu se’ ombra e ombra vedi». / Ed ei surgendo: «Or puoi la quantitate / comprender de l’amor ch’a te mi scalda, / quand’ io dismento nostra vanitate, / trattando l’ombre come cosa salda, Brother, do not, for you are a shade and you see a shade. And he, rising: Now you can grasp the measure of the love that warms me toward you, when I forget our emptiness, treating shades as solid things.
In Canto XXII of Purgatory the two poets talk behind Dante. Virgil asks, as a friend, how avarice found a place in Statius's breast, and Statius smiles and answers that it was the opposite, prodigality: a verse of the guide corrected him.
Per che non reggi tu, o sacra fame / de l’oro, l’appetito de’ mortali?’, / voltando sentirei le giostre grame. / Allor m’accorsi che troppo aprir l’ali / potean le mani a spendere, e pente’mi / così di quel come de li altri mali, Why do you not govern, O accursed hunger for gold, the appetite of mortals? Turning, I would have felt the bitter jousts. Then I perceived that the hands could open their wings too wide in spending, and I repented of that as of the other evils.
The law of the penalty is that of the opposite sin, which dries up together with what is purged, and that is why the prodigal stands among the avaricious:
E sappie che la colpa che rimbecca / per dritta opposizione alcun peccato, / con esso insieme qui suo verde secca; / però, s’io son tra quella gente stato / che piange l’avarizia, per purgarmi, / per lo contrario suo m’è incontrato, And know that the fault which rebounds by direct opposition against some sin dries up its green here together with it; therefore, if I was among that people who weep for avarice, to purge myself, it befell me by its contrary.
Virgil wants to know how he became a Christian, and Statius says that he was the first to have him drink on Parnassus and the first, after God, to light him, with an image that falls back on whoever hears it:
Facesti come quei che va di notte, / che porta il lume dietro e sé non giova, / ma dopo sé fa le persone dotte, / quando dicesti: ‘Secol si rinova; / torna giustizia e primo tempo umano, / e progenïe scende da ciel nova, You did as one who goes by night, who carries the lamp behind and does not help himself, but makes the people after him learned, when you said: The age is renewed; justice returns, and the first human time, and a new progeny descends from heaven.
He confesses that he was baptized before he led the Greeks to the rivers of Thebes, but out of fear he made himself a closed Christian, showing paganism for a long time, and that lukewarmness cost him more than four centuries in the fourth circle.
E pria ch’io conducessi i Greci a’ fiumi / di Tebe poetando, ebb’ io battesmo; / ma per paura chiuso cristian fu’mi, / lungamente mostrando paganesmo; / e questa tepidezza il quarto cerchio / cerchiar mi fé più che ’l quarto centesmo, And before I led the Greeks to the rivers of Thebes in my poem, I had baptism; but out of fear I became a closed Christian, showing paganism for a long time; and this lukewarmness made me circle the fourth circle more than four hundred years.
He then asks where Terence, Caecilius, Plautus and Varro are, and whether they are condemned, and Virgil answers without complaint:
Costoro e Persio e io e altri assai», / rispuose il duca mio, «siam con quel Greco / che le Muse lattar più ch’altri mai, / nel primo cinghio del carcere cieco; / spesse fïate ragioniam del monte / che sempre ha le nutrice nostre seco, These, and Persius, and I, and many others, my guide answered, are with that Greek whom the Muses nursed more than any other, in the first ring of the blind prison; we often speak of the mountain that always keeps our nurses with it.
In Canto XXV of Purgatory Dante asks how one grows thin where there is no need to nourish, and Virgil calls Statius to be the doctor of his wounds. Statius describes the generation of the body, the coming of the intellect, and the soul which, freed from the flesh, carries with it the human and the divine. The coming of the intellect is a breath:
lo motor primo a lui si volge lieto / sovra tant’ arte di natura, e spira / spirito novo, di vertù repleto, / che ciò che trova attivo quivi, tira / in sua sustanzia, e fassi un’alma sola, / che vive e sente e sé in sé rigira, the first mover turns to it joyfully, over so much art of nature, and breathes a new spirit, full of virtue, which draws into its substance what it finds active there, and becomes one single soul, which lives and feels and turns itself upon itself.
And what the soul carries away is what still moves it:
Quando Làchesis non ha più del lino, / solvesi da la carne, e in virtute / ne porta seco e l’umano e ’l divino: / l’altre potenze tutte quante mute; / memoria, intelligenza e volontade / in atto molto più che prima agute, When Lachesis no longer has any flax, it is loosed from the flesh, and in virtue carries away with it both the human and the divine: all the other powers mute; memory, understanding and will, in act, far sharper than before.
When the soul forms a figure in the air, that figure is called a shade:
Però che quindi ha poscia sua paruta, / è chiamata ombra; e quindi organa poi / ciascun sentire infino a la veduta. / Quindi parliamo e quindi ridiam noi; / quindi facciam le lagrime e ’ sospiri / che per lo monte aver sentiti puoi, Because from there it afterward takes its appearance, it is called a shade; and from there it then organizes each sense down to sight. From there we speak and from there we laugh; from there we make the tears and sighs that you may have heard on the mountain.
In Canto XXVII of Purgatory it is to him that Virgil says, on entering the fire, that he should come behind, and Dante walks between the two poets. In Canto XXVIII of Purgatory, when Matelda says that the ancient poets perhaps dreamed of this place, Dante looks back, and Virgil and Statius are laughing:
Io mi rivolsi ’n dietro allora tutto / a’ miei poeti, e vidi che con riso / udito avëan l’ultimo costrutto, Then I turned all the way back to my poets, and I saw that with laughter they had heard the last construction.
In Canto XXXII of Purgatory Statius goes with Matelda, and Dante behind the wheel of the chariot, and in Canto XXXIII of Purgatory Matelda, after taking Dante to Eunoe, calls to him with grace: come with him.
Themes Embodied
Statius embodies Redemption as a work for two: a poet who corrected himself through one verse he read, and who became a Christian through another, and who rises when his will is free. Art is in him more than in anyone in the canto: what saved him was a poem, and what held him was the penalty of the one who hid him. Love passes through both scenes: the affection of Virgil for him, who loved him without ever having seen him, and Statius's for the master, which makes him forget the vanity of shades and treat them as solid things.
The poem makes Statius an answer to Virgil, which only Virgil hears here. He is the disciple saved by a verse of the pagan master, and the poem leaves the master the image of the man who carries the light behind and does not profit by it himself. Statius does not say this with bitterness: he says it with love, and love is the reason he accepts one more sun in the penalty in exchange for having lived in Virgil's time. Dante, the third, hears the two and learns to poetize.
Divergent Readings
The secret conversion is the anomaly that explains the delay, and Statius attributes it to the fourth eclogue, which he reads as an involuntary prophecy of the birth of Christ:
The age is renewed, / justice returns, the golden age returns,/And a new progeny descends from heaven.Virgil guided Statius to the faith without ever reaching it himself:You were like one who goes by night / and carries the light behind him, and it does not help him,says Statius to him.
The text supports two readings of the lukewarmness. In the first, the poem is indulgent toward fear, because the baptism counted and human fear is forgivable. In the second, it is severe, because the measure of time in the penalty, more than four hundred years, is long for a fear. The poem gives both and leaves the reader between them.