The journal Classical Quarterly (Cambridge University Press) has just published in its 78th volume the article by Professor Cecilia Criado entitled “The Guilt of Cadmus the Farmer in Statius’ Thebaid”, which can be accessed openly at https://doi.org/10.1017/S0009838824000193.
The author studies the inversion to which Statius subjects the traditionally positive reading of agricultural labour. In doing so, the poet introduces two significant innovations with respect to his thematic precedents: first, the founder of the Theban saga, Cadmus, is explicitly pointed out as guilty of the internecine struggle that results from his farming and, second, he does not merely sow the land but, previously, ploughs it. Statius invariably confers negative connotations on the motif of tillage throughout his epic. The dire fruits that agricultural labour produces in the Cadmean farmlands amplify the Lucanian description of the Thessalian furrows from which, contaminated by the blood of Roman fighters, grow polluted crops. The blame that Statius places on the shoulders of Cadmus the farmer, the relationshipo he establishes between agriculture and fratricidal war, and his insistence on the perverse effects of agricultural labour transform the mythical Thebes into an exemplar of fratricidal Rome as apt as Lucan’s historical Thessaly.