The Bel(e)us Brothers: Egypt as a Site of Civil Strife in Statius’s Thebaid 6

My article is divided into three sections. The first surveys the extant literary evidence for the details of the story of Danaus and Aegyptus. I then examine its importance for Statius’s narrative and unearth the outline of Egypt as a mythical landscape via the significant patronymic Statius uses (Belides) in the parade of ancestors—to be read in close connection with the foundational stories of Argos. In the third section, finally, I consider Aegyptus’s portrayal in the hope of amending scholarly views of his presumed innocence by offering a link to Silvae 1.1 and Domitian’s countenance on his equestrian statue in the Forum as seen through Statius’s eyes. In sum, this article reflects on Statius’s renewal of the overdetermined Labdacid mythic tradition, with the grounding of its Egyptian background. This article also contributes to historicising trends in the study of the Thebaid, as well as probing the diegetic role of ekphrasis in the poem and the ekphrasis’ possible, distilled reverberations in the cultural milieu of Domitianic Rome.