Thebais

Books

• 1
  Book 1

  Oedipus is blind, disgraced, and rotting in a dungeon beneath his own palace. He prays to the Furies for vengeance on his sons, who have imprisoned him and forgotten him. The curse he calls down will destroy them both. Above, his sons Eteocles and Polynices agree to share the throne of Thebes — one year each, alternating. Polynices leaves for his year in exile. He will not go quietly.

  720 lines
• 2
  Book 2

  On a stormy night in Argos, Polynices and Tydeus — both exiles, both dangerous — fight on the doorstep of King Adrastus's palace. Adrastus recognises a prophecy fulfilled and gives them his daughters. The alliance that will destroy Thebes begins with a wedding feast. Meanwhile, Mercury escorts the shade of Laius to Eteocles in a dream: never surrender the throne.

  743 lines
• 3
  Book 3

  Tydeus goes to Thebes as ambassador, demanding Eteocles honour the agreement and yield the throne. Eteocles refuses. On the road home, fifty Theban warriors ambush Tydeus in a narrow pass. He kills them all except one, whom he sends back as a message. The embassy has failed. War is now certain.

  721 lines
• 4
  Book 4

  The Argive army musters: seven captains, seven gates. The roll call of heroes is magnificent — Tydeus, Capaneus, Hippomedon, Parthenopaeus, Amphiaraus the prophet who knows he marches to his death. The army moves through a drought-stricken landscape. At Nemea, they find no water. They find Hypsipyle instead, with a story to tell.

  842 lines
• 5
  Book 5

  Hypsipyle tells the tale of Lemnos — how the women of the island murdered every man, and how she alone saved her father. While she speaks, the infant prince she was nursing, Opheltes, is killed by a serpent in the grass. The child's death will give its name to the Nemean Games. It is also the first casualty of the march on Thebes — an innocent, killed by distraction.

  753 lines
• 6
  Book 6

  The funeral games for baby Opheltes — chariot races, foot races, boxing, wrestling, archery, javelin. The competitors are the heroes who will shortly be trying to kill each other. Statius gives them one last afternoon of glory before the war takes everything. The games are gorgeous, violent, and haunted by what comes next.

  947 lines
• 7
  Book 7

  The army reaches Thebes. The first blood is drawn. Mars descends to the battlefield and the fighting becomes apocalyptic. Amphiaraus, the prophet-warrior who foresaw his own death, drives his chariot into the Theban lines — and the earth opens beneath him. He plunges alive into the Underworld, chariot and all. Jupiter has decided he deserves better than a death at human hands.

  823 lines
• 8
  Book 8

  Tydeus's aristeia — his finest hour and his worst. Gravely wounded, buried under Theban dead, he fights with a savagery that transcends the human. Athena descends to save him with the gift of immortality. She arrives to find him gnawing the skull of the man who killed him. She turns away. The gift is withdrawn.

  766 lines
• 9
  Book 9

  Hippomedon dies fighting waist-deep in the river Ismenus, drowning Thebans as he drowns. Young Parthenopaeus — beautiful, barely old enough to fight — dies with his mother's name on his lips. The Argive champions are falling one by one. Thebes holds, but at a cost that is making the gods uneasy.

  907 lines
• 10
  Book 10

  Capaneus, the giant who fears nothing — not gods, not omens, not death — scales the walls of Thebes with a ladder and a curse on his lips. He reaches the battlements. He shakes his fist at the sky. Jupiter's thunderbolt answers. The body falls flaming from the walls, and even Capaneus's defiance cannot survive contact with the king of the gods.

  939 lines
• 11
  Book 11

  The brothers meet. Eteocles and Polynices face each other on the field and the poem reaches the moment everything has been building toward. They fight. They die — each by the other's hand, in each other's arms, their father's curse fulfilled to the letter. The funeral pyre rejects them: the flame splits in two, and even in death they cannot share.

  761 lines
• 12
  Book 12

  The Theban women are forbidden to bury their dead. They go to Athens. Theseus marches on Thebes, defeats Creon, and restores the rites of burial. Order returns — but it is the order of exhaustion, not justice. Statius ends with an address to his poem: do not try to rival the Aeneid. Just follow in its footsteps, at a distance.

  819 lines