Study guide
The Thebaid
Open the interactive study guide →
Overview
- Composed
- Over about twelve years in the AD 80s, and published c. AD 91–92, under the emperor Domitian
- Genre
- Latin mythological epic, written in conscious succession to Virgil's Aeneid
- Metre
- Dactylic hexameter
- Length
- 12 books, about 9,750 lines of Latin
- Setting
- Thebes and Argos, the march across the Peloponnese by way of Nemea, the plain before Thebes, the underworld and Olympus, and finally Athens
- Sources
- The Theban epic tradition (including the lost Thebaid of Antimachus), Attic tragedy (Aeschylus' Seven against Thebes, Euripides' Phoenician Women and Suppliants), Seneca's Theban plays, and above all Virgil, Ovid and Lucan
- Narrator
- An intrusive epic narrator who comments, laments, addresses his characters and at times declares that a crime should never be told
- Protagonists
- The brothers Eteocles and Polynices, sons of Oedipus, with the Argive king Adrastus and his allies, the Seven
- Conflict
- The brothers' broken pact to rule Thebes in alternate years, which draws Argos into war; then Creon's refusal to let the Argive dead be buried
- Key themes
- Fraternal and civil war; the inherited curse; tyranny and the lust for power; the Furies against Pietas and Clementia; the limits of heroism; burial, mourning and the dead
Context
Publius Papinius Statius was born in Naples, probably about AD 45–50, the son of a schoolmaster and professional poet who had won prizes in the Greek festivals of the Bay of Naples and who taught his son the poets. Statius made his career in Rome as a poet of the court and of the wealthy, winning the prize at Domitian's Alban festival but failing at the more prestigious Capitoline contest. His occasional poems, the Silvae, in five books (the last published after his death), celebrate patrons, villas, weddings, deaths and the emperor himself. After the Thebaid he began a second epic, the Achilleid, on the whole life of Akhilleus, but it breaks off early in its second book; he is thought to have died about AD 96, the year Domitian was murdered (Newlands 2002) (Dominik 2015).
The Thebaid was the work of Statius' maturity. In its closing lines he says it cost him twelve years of wakeful labour, and it was probably published about 91–92. It is dedicated, in the conventional manner of the age, to Domitian, whose German and Dacian campaigns the poet promises to sing one day. The poem takes up the most notorious story of Greek myth after the Trojan War: the house of Oedipus, whose sons, cursed by their father, destroy each other in a war for the throne of Thebes. Statius drew on the Greek epic tradition, on the Athenian tragedians and on Seneca, but his chief model is Virgil's Aeneid, whose twelve-book shape and two halves, of wandering and of war, he follows closely (Vessey 1973) (Ganiban 2007). The standard Latin text with facing translation is now Shackleton Bailey's Loeb; this guide quotes Mozley's earlier Loeb prose version (Shackleton Bailey 2003) (Statius 1928).
The poem was written in a Rome that remembered the civil wars of AD 68–69, when four emperors fought for power, and that lived under an autocrat who called himself 'master and god'. A story of two brothers who cannot share a kingdom had obvious resonance: Lucan's Civil War, written a generation earlier, had already made fraternal strife the emblem of Roman self-destruction. Scholars disagree about how far the Thebaid is a political poem, but few now read it as merely a learned retelling of myth (Ahl 1986) (Dominik 1994) (McNelis 2007).
Statius' style is dense, allusive and highly coloured. He favours vivid physical detail, long similes, personified abstractions (Pietas, Virtus, Clementia), scenes in the underworld and among the gods, and moments of horror that the narrator himself recoils from describing. Older critics called it 'baroque' or 'mannerist' and blamed it for excess; recent criticism has treated these qualities as deliberate, the expressive means of a poem about a world unhinged by nefas, crime against kin and the gods (Hardie 1993) (Hershkowitz 1998).
No ancient epic after Virgil had a richer afterlife. The Thebaid was a school text throughout the Middle Ages and was retold in the Old French Roman de Thèbes. Dante made Statius his guide, after Virgil, on the upper terraces of Purgatory, and imagined him as a secret convert to Christianity. Boccaccio's Teseida, which draws heavily on the Thebaid, lies behind Chaucer's Knight's Tale, and Chaucer drew on the poem again in Troilus and Criseyde and Anelida and Arcite. Pope translated the first book as a young man (Anderson 1988) (Lewis 1936).
Plot overview
Oedipus, blind and shut away in his palace, calls on the Fury Tisiphone to set his sons against each other. Eteocles and Polynices agree to rule Thebes in alternate years, and Polynices, losing the lot, goes into exile. At Argos he fights another exile, Tydeus, in the porch of King Adrastus, who recognises in them the lion and the boar of an old oracle and marries them to his daughters, Argia and Deipyle. When Polynices' year comes, Eteocles refuses to give up the throne; his embassy failed and his ambushers slain by Tydeus, Argos prepares for war despite the warnings of the seer Amphiaraus.
Seven champions march on Thebes: Adrastus, Polynices, Tydeus, Amphiaraus, Capaneus, Hippomedon and the young Arcadian Parthenopaeus. At Nemea, maddened by a drought that Bacchus sends to delay them, they are led to water by Hypsipyle, once queen of Lemnos, now a slave nursing the infant Opheltes. While she tells her story, a serpent kills the child; the Argives honour him, renamed Archemorus, 'beginning of doom', with a funeral and the first Nemean Games.
Before Thebes, Jocasta's attempt at peace fails, and the war begins. One by one the Seven fall: Amphiaraus is swallowed alive by the earth; Tydeus, mortally wounded, gnaws the head of his killer Melanippus and loses the immortality Minerva was bringing him; Hippomedon is overwhelmed by the river Ismenos; Parthenopaeus is killed in his first battle. The Theban prince Menoeceus kills himself to save the city, and Capaneus, scaling the walls and defying Jupiter, is blasted by a thunderbolt. Pietas tries and fails to stop the brothers, who kill each other in single combat.
Creon, now king, forbids the burial of the Argive dead. Argia steals into Thebes by night and, with Antigone, places Polynices' body on a pyre that turns out to be Eteocles'; the flame divides in two, as if the brothers' hatred survived death. The Argive widows go to Athens and take refuge at the altar of Clementia. Theseus, returning in triumph from the Amazons, marches on Thebes, kills Creon and allows the dead their funerals. The poet closes by bidding his book live, but follow the Aeneid at a distance.
Book by book
Book 1: The Curse and the Exile
Summary
After rejecting the earlier Theban myths and promising one day to sing Domitian's wars, the poet begins with Oedipus, who has blinded himself and lives hidden in his palace. Mocked by his sons, he prays to Tisiphone to set them at war, and the Fury rises from the underworld and infects the brothers with the lust for power. They agree to reign in alternate years; Polynices draws the lot of exile. In heaven Jupiter announces that he will punish both Thebes and Argos for their crimes, overrides Juno's protest for Argos, and sends Mercury to bring the ghost of Laius from the dead.
Polynices travels through a night of storm to Argos and shelters in the porch of King Adrastus, where he comes to blows with Tydeus, another exile, who has killed a brother in Calydon. Adrastus parts them and, seeing that one wears a lion's skin and the other a boar's, understands an oracle that his daughters would marry a lion and a boar. During a feast of Apollo he tells the story of Linus, Coroebus and the monster the god sent against Argos, and the book ends with a hymn to Apollo.
Analysis
The opening words announce a poem of 'fraternal battle-lines' (fraternas acies) and an 'alternate reign' (alterna regna): the plot is stated as a structural contradiction, power that can only be shared by turns. Oedipus' prayer makes the whole war a fulfilment of a father's curse, and the Fury who answers it is the first of the infernal agents who drive the poem. Jupiter's speech then gives the war a second cause, divine punishment for the ancestral crimes of both cities. Critics have debated whether Jupiter is a just judge or a power indifferent to the innocent; his plan reduces both cities to instruments (Feeney 1991).
The remainder of the book shows Statius' habit of setting a scene of hospitality against the violence to come. The brawl in Adrastus' porch is a miniature of the war, and the two hides prepare the animal imagery of Tydeus and Polynices throughout. The tale of Coroebus, who offers his own life to an angry god, anticipates later acts of self-sacrifice, especially Menoeceus' in Book 10 (Vessey 1973).
My spirit is touched by Pierian fire to recount the strife of brethren, and the battle of the alternate reign fought out with impious hatred, and all the guilty tale of Thebes.
The proposition names the subject in three phrases: kin against kin, power held by turns, and a guilty city. 'Impious' (profanis) points to the poem's central idea of nefas.
Do thou at least, my due defender, come hither, and begin a work of vengeance that will blast their seed for ever!
Oedipus turns to the Fury because the father of the gods 'does naught'; the epic action begins in a prayer to hell rather than to heaven.
Book 2: The Embassy of Tydeus
Summary
Mercury leads the ghost of Laius up from the underworld; disguised as the prophet Tiresias, it appears to Eteocles in a dream and urges him not to yield the throne. At Argos the double wedding of Argia to Polynices and Deipyle to Tydeus is marred by omens, and Argia wears the fatal necklace of Harmonia, whose history of disaster the poet recounts. When the year has passed, Tydeus goes to Thebes as ambassador to demand Polynices' turn.
Eteocles answers with defiance and sends fifty picked men to ambush Tydeus on his way home. In a narrow pass Tydeus kills them all except Maeon, whom he spares to carry the news to Thebes. He dedicates the spoils to Minerva, his patron goddess.
Analysis
Eteocles' refusal is presented as the logic of tyranny: once power is held, it will not be surrendered, and the ghost of his own grandfather encourages him. The necklace of Harmonia, made by Vulcan in revenge for Venus' adultery with Mars, gives the war a cursed object that passes through generations, as the Fury passes through the house of Oedipus.
Tydeus' fight against fifty is his first aristeia and introduces a hero of enormous courage and uncontrollable ferocity. Its debt to Virgil's night episode of Nisus and Euryalus and to Homer's ambush scenes is clear, but Statius inverts them: one man destroys a whole company, and the episode is the first breach of the laws that protect an envoy (Ganiban 2007).
for thou wast wearing, Argia, the ill-starred ornament of thy husband’s giving, the dread necklace of Harmonia.
The narrator's apostrophe to Argia marks her as both bride and future mourner; the gift that adorns her carries the curse of Thebes into Argos.
Book 3: Omens of War
Summary
Eteocles waits anxiously for his ambushers. Maeon returns alone, denounces the king for his crime, and kills himself rather than accept his clemency; Eteocles forbids his burial. Jupiter orders Mars to stir both peoples to war. Wounded Tydeus reaches Argos and calls for vengeance.
Adrastus asks Amphiaraus and Melampus to read the will of the gods. On a mountain-top they watch the birds and see an omen in the birds that foretells the deaths of the Argive leaders. Amphiaraus hides for twelve days and then refuses to speak, but Capaneus taunts him and the people demand war. Argia begs her father to fight for her husband, and Adrastus yields.
Analysis
Maeon's suicide is the first act of open defiance of a tyrant, and his body's denial of burial anticipates the closing crisis of the poem. Critics who read the Thebaid politically have made much of this scene: the narrator praises Maeon's freedom of speech in terms that fit a Roman audience living under an emperor (Ahl 1986) (Dominik 1994).
Amphiaraus' augury is an episode of tragic knowledge: the seer knows the truth and cannot prevent it. Capaneus, his opponent, is the poem's great despiser of the gods (contemptor superum), a figure modelled on Virgil's Mezentius. His creed that fear invented the gods sets the stage for his challenge to Jupiter in Book 10 (Feeney 1991).
Valour and the good sword in my hand are the gods I worship!
Capaneus' creed (virtus mihi numen et ensis / quem teneo) puts human prowess in place of divine authority.
Fear first created gods in the world!
The famous line (primus in orbe deos fecit timor) has an Epicurean sound and was much quoted later; in Statius it belongs to a speaker the poem will destroy.
Book 4: The March and the Drought
Summary
In the spring the Argive army sets out, and the poet catalogues its leaders and contingents, from Adrastus to the boy Parthenopaeus, who has left without the knowledge of his anxious mother, Atalanta. Amphiaraus goes too, knowing he will die, betrayed by his wife Eriphyle for the necklace of Harmonia. At Thebes, Eteocles consults Tiresias, who with his daughter Manto performs a necromancy and calls up the dead, among them Laius, who prophesies Theban victory in obscure terms.
To delay the Argives, Bacchus dries up the rivers of Nemea. The army, tormented by thirst, meets Hypsipyle, a woman of royal bearing in a slave's dress, nursing Opheltes, the infant son of the local king Lycurgus. She sets the child down and leads them to the one stream still flowing, the Langia.
Analysis
The catalogue imitates the gathering of Italian forces in Aeneid 7 and the Homeric Catalogue of Ships, but Statius gives it an elegiac undertone, since every name listed is a future death. The necromancy, modelled on the underworld scenes in Virgil, Seneca's Oedipus and Lucan's Erichtho episode, shows Thebes seeking knowledge from the dead; the ghosts of the city's past crowd forward in a parade of its crimes (Hardie 1993).
The drought begins the long Nemean delay of Books 4 to 6. Ancient readers knew that epic delay (mora) could be a structural device, and Statius makes it a thematic one: the gods hold the war back, and the poem turns aside into tales of other women's griefs before resuming its march to Thebes (Vessey 1973).
they behold on a sudden Hypsipyle, beauteous in her grief; at her breast Opheltes hangs, not her own child, but the ill-starred offspring of Inachian Lycurgus
The first sight of Hypsipyle sets royal dignity against servitude, and the word 'ill-starred' already marks the child for death.
Book 5: Hypsipyle's Tale
Summary
At Adrastus' request Hypsipyle tells her story. Venus, angered by neglect, drove the women of Lemnos to murder their husbands and kin in a single night; Hypsipyle alone saved her father Thoas by hiding him and setting him adrift. Made queen, she received the Argonauts, and bore twin sons to Jason, who then sailed on. When her deception was discovered she fled, was captured by pirates and sold to Lycurgus.
While she talks, a monstrous serpent sacred to Jupiter kills the sleeping Opheltes. The Argives kill the serpent, Capaneus striking the blow. Lycurgus wants to execute Hypsipyle and the camp nearly comes to civil strife; Amphiaraus calms it, declaring the child's death a sign from the gods. Hypsipyle's sons, now grown and serving in the army, recognise their mother.
Analysis
Hypsipyle's narrative is the Thebaid's equivalent of Aeneas' tale to Dido in Aeneid 2 and 3, an inset epic told by a survivor. Its subject, a massacre of men by their wives and daughters, is another version of the poem's theme of crime within the family, and Hypsipyle's piety towards her father is the counter-image of Oedipus' sons. Recent studies have stressed how Statius builds his poem out of such female voices of lament and witness (Augoustakis 2010).
The death of Opheltes, an infant killed while his nurse helps the army, is the first innocent death on the road to Thebes. Amphiaraus' reading of it, that the child's new name Archemorus means 'beginning of doom', turns a pastoral accident into an omen of the whole war.
the child Archemorus, whose name, alas, bears the seal of our fate
Amphiaraus interprets the death as divinely ordained, and the renaming fixes it as the first in a series.
Book 6: The Funeral Games
Summary
The Argives hold a magnificent funeral for Archemorus: a forest is felled for the pyre, his parents grieve, and the army processes round the burning body. They then found the Nemean Games in his honour. In the chariot race Polynices, driving Adrastus' divine horse Arion, is thrown, and Amphiaraus wins. Parthenopaeus wins the foot race after a rival pulls him back by the hair, and Hippomedon wins the discus.
In the boxing the Spartan Alcidamas outclasses the huge Capaneus, and Adrastus has to stop Capaneus from killing him. Tydeus wins the wrestling. When Adrastus shoots an arrow at a distant tree as part of the ceremonies, it flies back to his quiver, an omen that he alone will return from the war.
Analysis
Funeral games are a fixed scene of epic, from Iliad 23 to Aeneid 5. Statius' games are the longest in Latin, and they test each hero in miniature: the events reveal Polynices' poor control of his divine horse, Capaneus' rage, Tydeus' strength and the beauty of the doomed Parthenopaeus. Lovatt has shown how the games act as a model of politics and of poetry itself, with competition, judging and spectatorship all under scrutiny (Lovatt 2005).
The book is placed at the centre of the poem, at the end of its first half, as Aeneid 6 closes the first half of Virgil's poem. Where Virgil there descends to the underworld and the vision of Rome's future, Statius gives games that rehearse the coming deaths, a pause of order before the collapse.
He will not cease, I see well, till he pounds the brain within the shattered skull.
Adrastus' cry in the boxing match anticipates, in a sporting context, the savagery of the war, and especially the horror of Tydeus in Book 8.
Book 7: The Earth Opens
Summary
Jupiter, angry at the delay, sends Mercury to the house of Mars in Thrace to rouse the war. The Argives march on to Thebes. Bacchus pleads in vain for his native city. On the walls, Antigone watches the enemy with the old servant Phorbas, who names the champions to her. Jocasta goes out to the Argive camp with her daughters and pleads with Polynices for peace, and nearly moves him.
Tydeus speaks against her, and the Fury breaks the truce: two tame tigers sacred to Bacchus are maddened and cause bloodshed, and fighting breaks out. In the first great battle Amphiaraus, with Apollo as his charioteer, wins his aristeia. Then the earth opens, and he and his chariot plunge alive into the underworld.
Analysis
The house of Mars, with its personified forces of violence, is one of the allegorical set pieces that so influenced medieval poetry (Chaucer's temple of Mars in the Knight's Tale descends from it). Antigone's view from the walls imitates Helen's in Iliad 3, while Jocasta's embassy recalls the mother's plea in Euripides' Phoenician Women; Smolenaars's commentary documents the density of these models (Smolenaars 1994).
Amphiaraus' end is the first of the Seven's deaths, and the strangest: he does not die but descends whole, still holding his reins. The narrator lists rival explanations of the earthquake, a Lucretian gesture, before declaring the event a marvel. The seer's piety earns him not salvation but an unparalleled death.
Jocasta, wild-eyed, with hoary unkempt hair falling about her haggard face, her bosom bruised and livid and in her hand a branch of olive entwined with sable wool
The mother goes out as a suppliant for peace, yet the following simile likens her to the eldest of the Furies; even peace in Thebes wears the face of the curse.
he drops neither reins nor weapons, but, just as he was, drove his unshaken chariot down to Tartarus
Amphiaraus keeps his heroic posture even as he falls; the image was remembered by Dante (Inferno 20) and by Chaucer.
Book 8: Tydeus
Summary
Amphiaraus arrives alive among the dead, and Dis, enraged at the intrusion, vows a monstrous crime in return; the seer pacifies him. The Argives mourn and choose Thiodamas as their new prophet. Battle resumes. Ismene tells Antigone of an ominous dream about her betrothed Atys, who is soon after killed by Tydeus and dies in her arms.
Tydeus fights with superhuman fury, and Minerva protects him. At last he is struck by a spear thrown by the Theban Melanippus. Dying, he asks for his killer's head. Capaneus brings him Melanippus, still breathing; Tydeus has the head cut off and gnaws at the brain. Minerva, who was bringing him immortality, turns away in horror.
Analysis
Dis' anger, that the boundaries of the world have been broken, is one of the poem's statements of cosmic disorder: the war violates not only human law but the separation of the living and the dead. The ending of the book is the most notorious scene in Latin epic. Statius found the cannibal act in earlier Greek tradition, but he places it at the climax of Tydeus' heroism, so that the hero's greatest courage and his deepest bestiality are one (Hershkowitz 1998).
The episode has been read as a deliberate answer to the end of the Aeneid, where Aeneas kills Turnus in fury: Statius takes heroic rage to the point where even the protecting goddess cannot look at it. It is Tisiphone, the narrator says, who 'demands yet more', so that the Fury's work in the house of Oedipus spreads to the whole army (Ganiban 2007).
Thy head, thy head, O Melanippus, could one but bring me that!
Tydeus' dying wish rejects funeral rites and asks only for revenge; the repetition conveys his obsession.
when lo! she sees him befouled with the shattered brains’ corruption and his jaws polluted with living blood
The scene is focalised through Minerva's eyes: we see the act as the goddess sees it, and her flight withdraws divine favour from the Argive cause.
Book 9: Hippomedon and Parthenopaeus
Summary
The Thebans, enraged by Tydeus' act, fight for his body, and Hippomedon defends it. Driven into the river Ismenos, he slaughters the fleeing Thebans in the water until the river-god rises against him; nearly drowned, he struggles to the bank, where Juno pleads for him, and he dies under a rain of weapons.
The young Parthenopaeus fights brilliantly, protected by Diana, who mourns his coming death. Venus and Mars are drawn into the conflict. At last the Theban Dryas, a descendant of Orion, kills him. Dying, he sends a farewell to his mother Atalanta with a lock of his hair.
Analysis
Hippomedon's fight with the river imitates Akhilleus' battle with the Scamander in Iliad 21 and Turnus' plunge into the Tiber at the end of Aeneid 9, but where those heroes survive, Statius' hero is defeated by nature itself. Dewar's commentary on this book shows Statius reworking every detail of his models (Dewar 1991).
Parthenopaeus is the poem's figure of beautiful youth destroyed, like Virgil's Pallas, Lausus and Euryalus. His farewell to his mother is among the most moving passages in the Thebaid and illustrates a recurrent concern with parents who outlive their children, a theme that unites Atalanta with Hypsipyle, Eurydice and Creon (Augoustakis 2010) (Bernstein 2008).
take this tress in place of my whole body; once thou wert wont to trim it in spite of my vain scorn.
The lock of hair, often cut as an offering of mourning, becomes a substitute for the body the mother will never bury.
Book 10: Menoeceus and Capaneus
Summary
Juno sends Iris to the house of Sleep, which falls upon the Theban sentries. Thiodamas leads a night raid that massacres the sleeping enemy. Two young Argives, Hopleus and Dymas, try to recover the bodies of their lords, Tydeus and Parthenopaeus, and are killed. Tiresias prophesies that Thebes will be saved only if the last of the dragon's line, Menoeceus, son of Creon, gives his life.
Virtus, disguised as Manto, inspires the young man; he evades his father's pleas, climbs the walls and, praying for his city, stabs himself and falls among the enemy. Capaneus then scales the walls with a ladder, calls on the gods to fight him, and challenges Jupiter by name. Jupiter, at first laughing, strikes him with the thunderbolt.
Analysis
Hopleus and Dymas are a direct reworking of Nisus and Euryalus in Aeneid 9, but their aim is piety towards the dead rather than glory, a change that prepares the burial theme of Book 12. Menoeceus' self-sacrifice is the poem's clearest act of devotio, the Roman rite in which a general gives his life for the state. It is also the only act in the war that achieves what it intends, yet it is followed at once by his mother's lament and his father's turn to tyranny (Vessey 1973).
Capaneus is the Thebaid's version of the Giants who stormed Olympus, and Statius stages his assault as a cosmic event, with the gods themselves in uproar. His death is the one clear intervention of Jupiter in the battle. Whether it represents divine justice, or only the assertion of overwhelming power, is a central question for readers of the poem's theology (Feeney 1991) (Ahl 1986).
come thou, and strive with all thy flames against me, thou, Jupiter!
Capaneus' challenge names the god directly: the climax of his defiance of the gods since Book 3.
Even as he spoke, the thunderbolt struck him, hurled with the whole might of Jove
The answer is immediate. Statius' long description of the burning body clinging to the walls became a model for later images of punished pride.
Book 11: The Duel
Summary
Tisiphone calls her sister Megaera from the underworld to complete the crime. Polynices, eager for single combat, defies his father-in-law's pleas, and Eteocles, urged on by Creon, who blames him for his son's death, accepts despite the prayers of Jocasta. Antigone appeals to Polynices from the walls, and Adrastus tries to come between them before he flees. Jupiter turns his eyes from the earth.
Pietas descends from heaven and for a moment calms the brothers, but Tisiphone drives her back. The brothers fight; Polynices wounds Eteocles, and as he stoops to strip him, Eteocles stabs him with his last strength, and they die together. Oedipus comes out to mourn them, repenting his curse, and Jocasta takes her own life. Creon, now king, forbids the burial of the Argives and banishes Oedipus.
Analysis
This is the crime that the whole poem has been moving towards, and the narrator treats it as almost unspeakable, praying that later ages forget it. The defeat of Pietas by the Fury is the clearest emblem of the poem's moral world: the virtue that binds families and cities is powerless against the infernal forces unleashed in Book 1. Jupiter's withdrawal confirms that heaven will not intervene (Feeney 1991) (Hershkowitz 1998).
Statius models the duel on the end of the Aeneid, but splits Aeneas and Turnus into two brothers equally guilty, so that the end of the war brings neither victory nor resolution. Creon's accession shows tyranny passing to a new holder: the death of the rivals does not end the kingship over which they fought (Ganiban 2007) (McNelis 2007).
Nought am I any more among men,
Pietas laments her uselessness before descending. Her failure is the moral centre of the duel.
Go, savage souls, and pollute baleful Tartarus by your death
The narrator breaks in over the bodies with a curse rather than a lament; the epic voice itself takes up the language of the Furies.
Book 12: Clementia and Theseus
Summary
Creon burns his son Menoeceus with royal honours but leaves the Argives to the birds and beasts. The Argive widows set out to recover their dead. Argia leaves them and goes on by night with an old servant to the battlefield, where she finds Polynices' body. Antigone, who has come for the same purpose, meets her there. Together they wash the body and lay it on the only pyre still burning, which proves to be that of Eteocles; the flames divide into two hostile tongues. The guards seize the women, who compete to claim the guilt.
Juno guides the other widows to Athens, where they sit at the altar of Clementia, which has no image and accepts only tears. Theseus arrives in triumph from his victory over the Amazons, with Hippolyta at his side. Moved by the widows' pleas, he marches on Thebes and kills Creon in single combat. The Thebans welcome him and the dead are mourned and burned. The poet addresses his book, hoping it will survive him while it follows the Aeneid from afar.
Analysis
The last book turns from war to burial, and its heroes are women. Argia and Antigone carry out the duty the men have neglected, and their contest to accept the punishment answers the brothers' contest for the throne. The divided flame shows that the brothers' hatred outlasts death, and that their family can never be reconciled even in the ashes. Pollmann's commentary emphasises the book's structure of lament and its debts to Euripides' Suppliants (Pollmann 2004).
The altar of Clementia and the arrival of Theseus offer a resolution that some readers have found consoling and others deeply ambiguous. Clementia was a celebrated imperial virtue; Theseus restores law, but by killing a king in battle, and the poem ends not with a settled order but with the narrator's inability to describe the mourning. The epilogue's modest address to the book has been read both as genuine humility before Virgil and as a confident claim to a place beside him (Dominik 1994) (Ganiban 2007) (Hardie 1993).
There was in the midst of the city an altar belonging to no god of power; gentle Clemency had there her seat, and the wretched made it sacred
Statius' Athenian altar of Mercy has no image and no blood-sacrifice; it is the only altar in the poem that always answers prayer.
O live, I pray! nor rival the divine Aeneid, but follow afar and ever venerate its footsteps.
The famous close (vive, precor; nec tu divinam Aeneida tempta, / sed longe sequere et vestigia semper adora) makes Virgil the measure of the poem's achievement.
Characters
Thebans
- Eteocles
- Elder son of Oedipus and king of Thebes. Having reigned his year, he refuses to give up the throne, sets an ambush for an ambassador, and treats dissent with cruelty. Statius presents him as a tyrant, fearful and suspicious as well as ruthless. Pushed into the duel by Creon, he kills his brother with his last breath.
- Oedipus
- The blind former king, who has killed his father and married his mother. His curse on his sons begins the poem. When they die, he emerges to mourn them, grief-stricken and repentant, and is banished by Creon.
- Jocasta
- Mother and wife of Oedipus, mother of the brothers. She goes as a suppliant to the Argive camp in Book 7 and tries again to stop the duel; after her sons' deaths she kills herself.
- Antigone
- Daughter of Oedipus. She watches the Argives from the walls in Book 7, pleads with Polynices before the duel, and in Book 12 joins Argia in burning his body against Creon's decree. Statius gives her a smaller role than Sophocles does, and shares her famous deed with Argia.
- Ismene
- Sister of Antigone, whose betrothed Atys dies in her arms in Book 8.
- Creon
- Brother of Jocasta and father of Menoeceus. He tries to prevent his son's sacrifice, blames Eteocles for his death, and on becoming king forbids the burial of the Argives. Theseus kills him in Book 12.
- Menoeceus
- Son of Creon, the last descendant of the men sown from the dragon's teeth. Told by Tiresias that his death will save Thebes, he kills himself on the walls in Book 10, the poem's purest example of self-sacrifice.
- Tiresias
- The blind Theban prophet, who with his daughter Manto raises the dead in Book 4 and demands Menoeceus' sacrifice in Book 10.
- Maeon
- Sole survivor of the ambush on Tydeus. He denounces Eteocles to his face and kills himself in Book 3, an emblem of free speech against a tyrant.
Argives and their allies
- Polynices
- Younger son of Oedipus, exiled by the lot. Married to Argia, he leads the Argive war to win back his year of rule. He is shown as both wronged and dangerous, moved at times by his mother and wife but finally as eager for the duel as his brother.
- Adrastus
- The aged king of Argos, father of Argia and Deipyle. He receives the exiles kindly, presides over the games, and repeatedly tries to restrain the violence; the only one of the leaders to survive, he flees on his divine horse Arion.
- Argia
- Daughter of Adrastus and wife of Polynices. She persuades her father to make war, and in Book 12 goes alone by night to find and burn her husband's body, the poem's model of conjugal love and courage.
- Tydeus
- Exiled prince of Calydon, son of Oeneus and husband of Deipyle; small in stature and huge in courage, Minerva's favourite. He kills fifty ambushers in Book 2 and dominates the battle in Book 8, but loses the immortality his goddess offered him by gnawing the brain of his killer, Melanippus.
- Amphiaraus
- The prophet of Argos, who foresees the disaster but is forced to march. He wins the chariot race, has his aristeia in Book 7, and is swallowed alive by the earth; in Book 8 he speaks among the dead.
- Capaneus
- A giant warrior and despiser of the gods, who mocks the seers and claims that fear created the gods. He scales the walls of Thebes, challenges Jupiter and is struck by the thunderbolt in Book 10. His widow Evadne throws herself on his pyre.
- Hippomedon
- A massive and steadfast warrior, kinsman of Adrastus. He defends the body of Tydeus and is overwhelmed by the river Ismenos in Book 9.
- Parthenopaeus
- The beautiful young son of the Arcadian huntress Atalanta, the youngest of the Seven. He wins the foot race, fights under Diana's protection, and dies in his first battle in Book 9.
- Hypsipyle
- Former queen of Lemnos, who alone spared her father in the Lemnian massacre; now a slave and nurse of Opheltes at Nemea. Her tale fills Book 5, and she is reunited with her sons by Jason.
- Opheltes (Archemorus)
- The infant son of Lycurgus of Nemea, killed by a serpent while Hypsipyle guides the Argives to water. Renamed Archemorus, 'beginning of doom', he is honoured with the first Nemean Games.
Others
- Theseus
- King of Athens, returning in triumph from the Amazons. He answers the Argive widows' appeal at the altar of Clementia, kills Creon, and allows the dead to be buried.
Gods and powers
- Jupiter
- King of the gods, who decrees the war as a punishment of both cities, strikes down Capaneus and finally turns his eyes away from the duel. Whether he is just, or merely powerful, is one of the poem's questions.
- Juno
- Patron of Argos, who protests against Jupiter's plan and later guides the Argive widows to Athens.
- Bacchus
- Theban god, son of Semele, who delays the Argives with drought and pleads for his city.
- Minerva
- Tydeus' patron goddess, who turns from him in horror at his final act.
- Tisiphone and Megaera
- Furies of the underworld. Tisiphone answers Oedipus' curse, inflames the brothers and drives Pietas from the field; Megaera joins her for the duel.
- Pietas
- Personified Piety, who descends in Book 11 to stop the brothers' duel and is driven back by the Fury.
- Clementia
- Personified Mercy, whose imageless altar at Athens receives the widows in Book 12.
Themes
Fraternal Strife and Civil War
The poem's first words name 'fraternal battle-lines', and the hatred of Eteocles and Polynices governs everything that follows. For Roman readers, war between brothers was the myth of Rome itself (Romulus and Remus) and the image of its civil wars, which Lucan had described as a crime of kin against kin. The Thebaid generalises this conflict: the Argive camp nearly dissolves into civil war over Opheltes, and the brothers' hatred survives even in their ashes (McNelis 2007) (Bernstein 2008).
Power and Tyranny
The cause of the war is the refusal to share power. Eteocles is the poem's portrait of a tyrant: suspicious, violent and dependent on fear. Creon, at first a grieving father, becomes a tyrant in his turn. The poem asks what kingship does to those who hold it, and its narrator often speaks of royal power with bitter irony, which political readers connect with Domitian's Rome (Ahl 1986) (Dominik 1994).
The Curse and Inherited Guilt
Oedipus' curse and the Fury he summons place the war within a long history of Theban crime, from Cadmus' sowing of the dragon's teeth to the house of Laius. The necklace of Harmonia and the ghosts in Book 4 make the city's past an active force. The question of whether the characters choose their crimes or are driven to them remains open throughout.
Pietas, the Furies and the Gods
Statius' supernatural world is divided between Olympus, the underworld and a set of personified powers. The Furies are more effective than the Olympians, and Pietas and Clementia appear only to be defeated or to act outside the field of war. Feeney argued that these figures show the old gods giving way to abstractions, and that the poem presents a cosmos in which justice is hard to find (Feeney 1991).
The Limits of Heroism
Each of the Seven embodies a form of heroic excess: Tydeus' rage, Capaneus' defiance of the gods, Hippomedon's endurance, Parthenopaeus' reckless youth. The poem admires their courage and records its horror at what it becomes. Tydeus' end shows heroism collapsing into bestiality, and Capaneus' death sets the limit of human aspiration (Hershkowitz 1998).
Burial and the Dead
From Maeon's unburied body in Book 3 to the Argive dead in Book 12, the poem is preoccupied with the right of the dead to burial. The funeral of Archemorus at its centre, the efforts of Hopleus and Dymas, and the night journey of Argia all prepare the final book, where funeral rites become the measure of civilisation and Theseus fights to restore them (Pollmann 2004).
Women, Mourning and Witness
Women's voices punctuate the poem: Hypsipyle's narrative, Jocasta's plea, Atalanta's fears, Ismene's dream, the laments of Eurydice and of Menoeceus' mother, the courage of Argia and Antigone. They see the war's cost more clearly than the warriors and often speak against it, and in Book 12 they become its agents (Augoustakis 2010).
Motifs
Doubles and Pairs
The poem is full of pairings that echo the brothers: two exiles at Adrastus' door, two daughters married on one day, two sisters at Polynices' body, the two flames of the shared pyre. Even the young pair Hopleus and Dymas repeat the pattern in a loyal key.
Delay
Epic action is constantly held back: by the drought and the Nemean episode, by Jocasta's embassy, by the brothers' hesitation before the duel, and by the narrator's own reluctance to tell the crime. Delay keeps open the possibility of peace that the poem then closes.
Omens and Prophecy
Birds, dreams, ghosts and oracles foretell the outcome repeatedly, through Amphiaraus, Tiresias, Manto, Laius and Ismene's dream. The characters know or could know the future, and still choose war.
The Underworld
The poem moves between earth and Hades more than any earlier epic: Tisiphone's ascent, Laius' ghost, the necromancy, Amphiaraus' descent and the Fury's return in Book 11. Hell is the poem's true source of energy.
The Narrator's Intrusions
Statius' narrator laments, praises, questions and curses. He hopes that later ages will forget the duel, and at the end confesses that a hundred voices would not suffice to tell the mourning. His interventions turn the epic voice into a moral participant.
Symbols
The Necklace of Harmonia
Made by Vulcan to bring ruin on the children of Venus and Mars, it destroys every woman who wears it. It passes from Argia to Eriphyle, who betrays Amphiaraus for it, carrying the Theban curse into Argos.
The Divided Flame
When Polynices' body is laid on Eteocles' pyre, the flame splits into two rival tongues. The image, taken up by Dante in Inferno 26, makes the brothers' hatred eternal.
The Altar of Clementia
The Athenian altar of Mercy, with no image and no sacrifice except tears, is the poem's answer to the infernal powers. It is a symbol of a different kind of divinity, located in human hearts.
The Lion and the Boar
The skins worn by Polynices and Tydeus fulfil Adrastus' oracle and identify the two exiles as wild beasts; the animal similes of Tydeus' fighting in Books 2 and 8 develop the same idea.
Critical debates
Statius and Virgil
The Thebaid follows the Aeneid in structure, in many scenes and in its proud yet deferential epilogue, which tells the poem not to rival 'the divine Aeneid' but to follow its footsteps. Older criticism took this as a sign of a derivative talent. More recent studies argue that the imitation is critical: Statius rewrites Virgil's scenes of founding and pietas in a world where they fail, so that the Thebaid becomes a dark reading of the Aeneid itself (Ganiban 2007) (Hardie 1993).
The epilogue has itself been debated. Some read its humility as sincere; others note that by naming the Aeneid as the only work above his, Statius places his own poem second in all Latin epic, a claim both modest and ambitious (Vessey 1973).
Domitian and the Politics of Tyranny
The poem is dedicated to Domitian and flatters him in the proem, but its central figures are tyrants and its narrator speaks with apparent sympathy for the victims of power, such as Maeon. Ahl argued that Statius wrote in a code of 'figured speech', criticising the emperor indirectly; Dominik reads the poem as a sustained exploration of the abuse of power in heaven and on earth (Ahl 1986) (Dominik 1994).
Other scholars are more cautious, seeing the poem's politics in general terms, as a meditation on civil war and kingship rather than an attack on a particular ruler, and pointing to Statius' warm praise of Domitian in the Silvae (Newlands 2002) (McNelis 2007).
The Gods, Abstractions and the Absence of Justice
Jupiter decrees the war as punishment, but the Thebaid gives the Olympians little moral authority: they are partisan, distant or ineffective, while the Furies drive the action. Feeney's influential study argued that Statius pushes the epic machinery towards personified abstractions and a sense of a godless or unjust universe; Lewis, earlier, saw in such figures the beginnings of medieval allegory (Feeney 1991) (Lewis 1936).
Some critics see the end of the poem, with its altar of Mercy, as restoring a moral order; others reply that Clementia has no power in war and that the poem never recovers a just Jupiter (Dominik 1994) (Hershkowitz 1998).
Unity and the 'Baroque' Style
Earlier critics often treated the Thebaid as a series of brilliant episodes without a coherent design, and criticised its ornament, its horror and its long digressions such as the Nemean books. Vessey's study defended the poem's unity and moral structure, and later critics have argued that its stylistic excess serves a vision of madness and nefas (Vessey 1973) (Hershkowitz 1998).
The 'baroque' label, borrowed from art history, has been both used and resisted. Recent work tends to describe Statius' style in terms of intertextual density and deliberate self-consciousness rather than decline (Dominik 2015).
Theseus and Clementia
Is Theseus a saviour who restores law, or another violent ruler? His arrival brings burial and mercy, yet he comes as a conqueror, kills Creon in battle and is described with the imagery of Roman triumph. Clementia was one of the virtues claimed by emperors, and Roman readers may have thought of Julius Caesar and Augustus (Pollmann 2004) (Dominik 1994).
Some readers see a hopeful ending that answers the dark close of the Aeneid; others an ambiguous one in which the cycle of power continues under a new name (Ganiban 2007).
Statius in the Middle Ages
The Thebaid was among the most read Latin poems in medieval schools, supplied with commentaries and summaries. Dante, in Purgatorio 21–22, makes Statius say that Virgil's poetry led him to the faith and that he lived as a secret Christian, a fiction without ancient support that shows the authority the poem had acquired (Durling 2003).
Boccaccio's Teseida, which draws above all on the Thebaid's last book, gave Chaucer the plot of the Knight's Tale, which opens with Theseus' return and the mourning women of Thebes; in Troilus and Criseyde Cassandra summarises the whole Thebaid to explain Diomede's ancestry (Anderson 1988) (Benson 1987).
Women's Voices
Recent criticism has emphasised the place of women in the Thebaid, both as mourners who expose the cost of war and as actors who defy male authority. Studies of Hypsipyle, Jocasta, Argia and Antigone have shown how Statius draws on tragedy and Ovidian elegy to give these figures their own voice in a genre usually focused on men (Augoustakis 2010) (Bernstein 2008).
Key passages
My spirit is touched by Pierian fire to recount the strife of brethren, and the battle of the alternate reign fought out with impious hatred, and all the guilty tale of Thebes.
The proem announces a subject of brothers in war and a kingship held by turns. 'Impious' and 'guilty' set the moral tone of a poem about nefas, crime against kin and the gods. The Pierian fire, the Muses' inspiration, is already an image of the fury the poem will describe.
Do thou at least, my due defender, come hither, and begin a work of vengeance that will blast their seed for ever!
The blind father prays to the Fury because he believes heaven has ignored his wrongs. The curse sets the plot in motion and makes the infernal powers, not the Olympians, the poem's driving force.
Valour and the good sword in my hand are the gods I worship!
Capaneus rejects the seer's warnings and puts his own courage in place of the gods. The line defines him as the poem's despiser of the gods and prepares his challenge to Jupiter in Book 10.
Fear first created gods in the world!
A maxim with a long later life, often quoted out of context. In the poem it is the claim of a speaker who will be destroyed by a god, so the line both expresses scepticism and is refuted, at least in appearance, by the plot.
when lo! she sees him befouled with the shattered brains’ corruption and his jaws polluted with living blood
Minerva arrives with the gift of immortality and sees Tydeus gnawing Melanippus' brain. The moment reverses the reward of heroism: the hero's rage cancels his apotheosis.
Nought am I any more among men
Pietas, the virtue Virgil made central to Roman identity, complains that she has no place on earth. Her brief intervention and expulsion by the Fury show the poem's moral world, in which piety is defeated by the forces of hell.
Go, savage souls, and pollute baleful Tartarus by your death
The narrator does not mourn but curses, and prays that later ages forget the crime. The intrusion shows the epic voice taking a moral stand against its own subject.
the pile shook, and streams up with double head, each darting tongues of flashing light.
When Polynices' body touches Eteocles' pyre, the flame divides. The portent shows the brothers' hatred surviving death, and it became one of the poem's best-known images.
There was in the midst of the city an altar belonging to no god of power; gentle Clemency had there her seat, and the wretched made it sacred
The altar of Mercy at Athens is the poem's counter-image to the Furies: a divinity without image or sacrifice, whose worship consists in tears and who rejects no prayer.
O live, I pray! nor rival the divine Aeneid, but follow afar and ever venerate its footsteps.
Statius closes by asking his poem to survive him while honouring Virgil as an unrivalled model. The lines can be read as humble deference or as a claim to the second place in Latin epic.
Questions for study
Why does Statius begin the war with Oedipus' curse rather than with the brothers' quarrel itself?
Consider how the curse links human crime to the infernal powers, and how it makes the war an inheritance of the house of Laius.
How does the Thebaid present Jupiter? Is he a just god?
Compare his speech in Book 1, his treatment of Capaneus in Book 10 and his withdrawal in Book 11. Consider Feeney's argument about the gods and abstractions.
What is the function of the long Nemean episode (Books 4–6) in the structure of the poem?
Think about delay, the death of Opheltes as omen, the funeral games as a rehearsal of the war, and the parallel with Aeneid 1–6.
How does Statius use Virgil? Choose one episode and compare it with its model in the Aeneid.
Hopleus and Dymas and Nisus and Euryalus; the duel and Aeneas' killing of Turnus; Hippomedon and Turnus in the Tiber.
Is Tydeus a hero or a monster?
Look at his fight against fifty in Book 2 and his death in Book 8, and at Minerva's reaction. What does the poem suggest about heroic rage?
Why does Pietas fail in Book 11?
Consider the role of the Furies throughout the poem and the significance of pietas in Virgil.
What role do women play in the Thebaid?
Hypsipyle's narrative, Jocasta's embassy, Atalanta and Parthenopaeus, Argia and Antigone in Book 12.
Can the Thebaid be read as a political poem about Domitian's Rome?
Look at the dedication, at Eteocles and Creon as tyrants, at Maeon's free speech, and at the arguments of Ahl and Dominik.
Does the ending with Theseus and Clementia resolve the poem's conflicts?
Consider the nature of Clementia's altar, Theseus' use of force, and the poet's inability to describe the final mourning.
Why was Statius so important to medieval poets such as Dante and Chaucer?
Think about the poem's allegorical figures, its moral themes, its place in the school curriculum, and Dante's story of Statius' secret conversion.
Further reading
- Ahl, Frederick. "Statius' Thebaid: A Reconsideration." In Aufstieg und Niedergang der römischen Welt II.32.5, ed. Wolfgang Haase, 2803–2912. Berlin: de Gruyter, 1986.
- Anderson, David. Before the Knight's Tale: Imitation of Classical Epic in Boccaccio's Teseida. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1988.
- Augoustakis, Antony. Motherhood and the Other: Fashioning Female Power in Flavian Epic. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010.
- Benson, Larry D., gen. ed. The Riverside Chaucer. 3rd ed. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1987.
- Bernstein, Neil W. In the Image of the Ancestors: Narratives of Kinship in Flavian Epic. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2008.
- Dewar, Michael, ed. Statius: Thebaid IX. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1991.
- Dominik, William J. The Mythic Voice of Statius: Power and Politics in the Thebaid. Leiden: Brill, 1994.
- Dominik, William J., Carole E. Newlands, and Kyle Gervais, eds. Brill's Companion to Statius. Leiden: Brill, 2015.
- Durling, Robert M., ed. and trans. The Divine Comedy of Dante Alighieri. Vol. 2: Purgatorio. Introduction and notes by Ronald L. Martinez and Robert M. Durling. New York: Oxford University Press, 2003.
- Feeney, D. C. The Gods in Epic: Poets and Critics of the Classical Tradition. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1991.
- Ganiban, Randall T. Statius and Virgil: The Thebaid and the Reinterpretation of the Aeneid. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007.
- Hardie, Philip. The Epic Successors of Virgil: A Study in the Dynamics of a Tradition. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993.
- Hershkowitz, Debra. The Madness of Epic: Reading Insanity from Homer to Statius. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1998.
- Lewis, C. S. The Allegory of Love: A Study in Medieval Tradition. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1936.
- Lovatt, Helen. Statius and Epic Games: Sport, Politics and Poetics in the Thebaid. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005.
- McNelis, Charles. Statius' Thebaid and the Poetics of Civil War. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007.
- Newlands, Carole E. Statius' Silvae and the Poetics of Empire. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002.
- Pollmann, Karla F. L., ed. Statius, Thebaid 12: Introduction, Text, and Commentary. Paderborn: Schöningh, 2004.
- Shackleton Bailey, D. R., ed. and trans. Statius: Thebaid. 2 vols. Loeb Classical Library 207, 498. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2003.
- Smolenaars, J. J. L. Statius, Thebaid VII: A Commentary. Leiden: Brill, 1994.
- Statius. Trans. J. H. Mozley. 2 vols. Loeb Classical Library. London: Heinemann; New York: G. P. Putnam's Sons, 1928.
- Vessey, David. Statius and the Thebaid. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1973.
Written by the Poetry Codex editors. Updated 2026-10-19.