Greek Mythology in Statius: Dante, Harold Bloom, and the Limitations of Political Psychology

Abstract

This essay compares Dante’s literary invention of Statius as a covert Christian, and his interpretation of the Greek mythology of the Thebaid as a symptom of religious hypocrisy, with Bloomian approaches to Flavian epic, reading the Purgatory as an artistically powerful psychogram of ‘Silver’ Latin literature. As a dialectical alternative to that approach, the example of the unfinished Achilleid is used to question the value of political psychology as a tool of literary history.