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In this talk, I consider survival as a problem central to Statius’s Thebaid. While we often think of survival as a transformative or triumphant experience, the Thebaid’s many survivors tell a different story: the experience of survival in Statius’s epic of aftermath is overwhelmingly a negative one, an intolerable state to which survivors feel they have been condemned. This unusually negative vision of survival in the Thebaid not only drives the epic’s plot but, I argue, forms a “poetics of survival,” through which Statius figures his own poetic activity in a long-lived and crowded agonistic Latin epic tradition against the backdrop of an imperial system fundamentally altered by the upheavals of the 1st century CE. Reading the Thebaid’s poetics of survival through the lenses of trauma theory and postmemory, I will explore the questions that the Thebaid asks about how to value the experience of survival and the burdens and obligations that come with it, and the possibilities—and the limits—of narrative in confronting survivors’ trauma. The exploration will in turn provide a basis for considering the possibilities and limits of using trauma and postmemory as theoretical approaches to Latin epic poetry.

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