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58 pages 1 hour read

Statius, Transl. Jane Wilson Joyce

Thebaid

Fiction | Novel/Book in Verse | Adult | Published in 92

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Important Quotes

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“… [Tisiphone] without pause / took her well-known way to Thebes, for no road sees her / speed to and fro more often—she likes it better than home.” 


(Book 1, Lines 100-102)

In myth and ancient literature, the Furies were the special agents of vengeance for interfamilial crime. Thebes is so infused with it, Statius posits, that Tisiphone thinks of the city as her home.

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“One obsessive question / wracks the man night and day: When will he see his brother, humbled, / step down from the throne, find himself master of Thebes and all / her might? He’d gladly trade his life for that bright dawn!” 


(Book 1, Lines 316-319)

Polynices’ strange obsessiveness here is early foreshadowing of his potential for tyranny. This is not how a hero behaves. 

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“… They had come here, he felt, led / by the Gods’ clear design, the men prophetic Apollo’s riddling rhymes intended to be his sons-in-law—men / one mistook for beasts!” 


(Book 1, Lines 496-497)

This line refers to Apollo’s prophecy to Adrastus, which promised him sons-in-law. Interestingly, Polynices and Tydeus are likened to beasts—and they will soon devolve into beastly behavior.

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“Those he’d noticed expressing delight and those who straightaway / fawned on the upstart, as well as any who’d groaned at his / banishment—these he tallied each night and early each / day. Grief and demented rage gnawed at his soul […]” 


(Book 2, Lines 316-319)

More despotic potential from Polynices; he has carefully noted who is his friend and who is not and is prepared to clean house when he retakes Thebes—much as a bad Roman emperor would do on ascension to the throne.

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“… A stout lance … passed through him and—one shaft stitching breast to kindred / breast—pierced his brother who, still alive, focused his swimming / eyes, then, seeing Periphas near death, shut out the sight […]” 


(Book 2, Lines 636-639)

One of Statius’s many descriptions of the death of twins, whose intertwinement strikes a chord of pity and also revulsion. Lucan used the motif of twins to similar effect in his Civil War, where they are a metaphor for civil war itself.

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“… On that grisly field, / seeking her sons … not unlike a Thessalian witch thrilled by war’s results … she roams the battlefield […]” 


(Book 3, Lines 138-143)

In this passage, Statius describes a mother seeking the corpses of her children on the battlefield with a jarring allusion: Lucan’s Thessalian witch Erictho, who in Book 6 of Civil War scavenged a battlefield for necromantic rituals. In drawing this connection Statius again “perverts” familial bonds; a mother is linked to a witch, an enduring symbol of barrenness and anti-civilization. 

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“If you object to my making this generation pay / for crimes of old … I swear / with my own hand I’ll shake Thebes off her foundations […]” 


(Book 3, Lines 239-252)

Jupiter threatens the heavenly court with dire consequences if they try to make him do the right thing.

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“You’d think they had / mortal minds, the way they held their tongues and breath—hushed / as those days when the winds’ extended treaty lulls / the sea […]” 


(Book 3, Lines 253-256)

The gods in Jupiter’s court are explicitly compared to mortals; Jupiter’s tight leash on them has completely hamstrung their power. They are as helpless as Thebes’ courtiers to dissuade their evil king.

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“Tisiphone roared with laughter—she relished the future!” 


(Book 4, Line 213)

While mortals in the Thebaid are often afraid to look at or acknowledge the future, Tisiphone sees what is coming and cannot wait for it to arrive.

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“… Who doesn’t know of the rolling stone, / tantalizing pools, or of Tityos feeding the vultures / and Ixion blacking out on his eternally turning / wheel?” 


(Book 4, Lines 537-540)

In a fun metaliterary moment, Tiresias encourages Manto to skip over the parts of the Underworld everyone already knows because other poets have beaten them to death. Give us something new!

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I … exposed you to fate. What madness made off with my mind? / How was I so forgetful … While I recounted my country’s fate and led the talk round / my own renown … I paid Lemnos the crime I owed.” 


(Book 5, Lines 620-628)

Hypsipyle blames herself for Opheltes’s death—specifically, she blames her own meandering talking and delaying, a crime Statius is also guilty of too, in putting off the climax of the poem.

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“How sweet [Fortune] finds it to crush / immoderate hopes! and what can a man rightly do / against Gods?” 


(Book 6, Lines 691-693)

Statius steps out of the narrative and addresses his audience. He reiterates the fickleness of Fortune and the “damned if you do, damned if you don’t” nature of the human condition.

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“Who would deny that omens flow from hidden causes? / The Fates reveal, but humans will not take heed, and the trust- / worthy forewarning is wasted; we thus make omens / into coincidence, fueling Fortune’s power to hurt us.” 


(Book 6, Lines 934-937)

Again, Statius asks his reader why people try to peer into the future at all. While omens are true, we convince ourselves that they are simply coincidence, and thus open ourselves up to Fortune’s attacks.

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“Halts were scorned—why, they hardly / took time out to sleep or eat! Like men fleeing, they / sped towards the foe […]” 


(Book 7, Lines 400-402)

This is a direct rework of one of the most famous lines of Lucan’s Civil War, in which men paradoxically flee into war.

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“To this point, war made a gallant show: plumes stood upright, […] arms were all well ordered […] But, once raging Madness and Courage, careless of life, / had released their force […]”


(Book 8, Lines 402-411)

While everyone was ready to put their best foot forward in their lovely arms, civil war lets no-one appear noble. The passions of Madness and Courage quickly mar everything with gore.

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“Tydeus […] mad / with joy and rage when he saw that face gasping for air, / saw those fierce eyes, and in the sight perceived himself, he / insisted they cut off his enemy’s head […]” 


(Book 8, Lines 752-753)

In another paradoxical image underlining the self-destructive nature of civil war, Tydeus recognizes himself in his enemy, Melanippus—and eats him anyways.

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“It’s much the same when a shepherd […] has […] dislodged a swarm of bees: a cloud / fighting mad and buzzing fiercely, works itself up […] but soon, with weary wings, / they clasp their yellow combs and, bemoaning their captive / honey, press to their breasts the wax that was their life’s work.” 


(Book 10, Lines 574-579)

Virgil famously compared a well-ordered city to a busy hive of bees in his Georgics; Statius must be thinking of Virgil’s bees here, describing the collapse of Theban social order.

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“Snap to it! No dawdling! Let’s make haste—he’s approaching the gates, they say.” 


(Book 11, Lines 201-202)

In disguise, Tisiphone once again acts as Statius’s opponent in combatting narrative delay. As soon as Adrastus starts offering Polynices good advice, she drags the prince away.

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“[…] Like some airborne plague, some hostile land, you’ve drained her / dry […]” 


(Book 11, Lines 274-275)

Creon compares the presence of Eteocles to an airborne pathogen. The ancients conceived of blood guilt (miasma) as a sort of disease; it steadily infects everything in its radius until it is cut out and removed.

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“[…] he glared at his brother—for, deep in his heart, jealousy burned / at the other’s vast retinue, regal casque […]” 


(Book 11, Lines 396-398)

Polynices’ true nature reveals itself: like Eriphyle, like Opheltes’s mother, he is consumed and powered by jealousy.

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“‘[…] I look on his grave eyes, his features drowning in death! / Here, someone, quick! the scepter, the crown adorning his head— / while he still sees.” 


(Book 11, Lines 558-560)

Once again evoking the motif of blindness/ignorance versus sight/seeing the truth, Polynices is cruelly desperate that Eteocles see his coronation before he dies.

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“Away, brutal souls! […] In all / lands and in every age, let one day alone have seen / this breed of foul deed, let this monstrous infamy fall / from memory—only kings should recall such a duel.” 


(Book 11, Lines 574-579)

Perhaps Statius addresses this passage to the emperor Domitian: he wants him alone to contemplate Eteocles and Polynices and their end.

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“Night favors the fugitives, holding them close in her welcome dark.” 


(Book 11, Line 761)

The latter books of the Thebaid are characterized by physical darkness; many of the events, like Argia searching the battlefield, take place under cover of night. It is as if all of Thebes and its radius are metaphorically blinded by the crimes of the house of Oedipus

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“Often too they were fooled (Fortune snickered the while) and shed / tears over their foes—no sure way for the wretches to tell / whose flesh they should honor and whose tread underfoot […] 


(Book 12, Lines 35-37)

The harsh reality of civil war: you cannot tell friend from foe because in reality, everyone is the same.

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“Here lift your head and unseeing eyes: to your Thebes has / Argia come! Up now! Lead me inside the city walls, show me your ancestral home—it’s your turn to make me welcome.” 


(Book 12, Lines 325-328)

In a particularly tragic touch, Argia asks the corpse of Polynices to show her around his hometown as she had done for him in Inachus. Notice the detail of his now “unseeing” eyes.

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