The Hut and the Temple

This chapter proposes an analysis of the Hercules Surrentinus Polli Felicis (Silv. 3.1), the poem celebrating a temple to Hercules that Pollius built in his villa in less than a year and that had already been described in Silvae 2.2. In contrasting the previous little shrine of Hercules with the new, elegant structure, Statius engages with Augustan models that compare Rome’s past and present: book 8 of the Aeneid, a number of elegies in book 4 of Propertius, the passage on cultus in Ovid’s Ars amatoria, and the speech of Janus in the Fasti. Thus, passages of ‘national’ aetiological poetry are reworked in order to suit the encomium of a private patron. Furthermore, the miraculous speed of the construction, vying with that of the poetic composition itself, creates the impression of a metamorphosis: before the reader’s eyes, the house becomes a temple, as in Ovid’s narrative of Philemon and Baucis. The Callimachean motif of humble hospitality, which had already been revisited by Virgil and Ovid, is thus inverted: it now suits a eulogy of luxury, which becomes morally legitimate. The construction of the temple, like that of the villa itself, is also a victory of technology over nature, a civilizing opus that benefits the whole community. Religion, which is a principle of civilization, is thus reconciled with Pollius’ Epicureanism. By transforming the ‘hut’ in Pollius’ villa into a ‘temple’, Statius recreates for his patron the Augustan myth of Rome’s metamorphosis from brambles to golden shrines

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