Thebaid - Dark Days of War

The last time I read Statius' Thebaid it was in the spring and summer of 1970, and I was attempting to write a lengthy paper on the gods and fate in Statius' epic. The paper was long overdue, from a seminar I'd taken the previous fall, but I was determined to complete it that summer. That was a strange time of the world for me. I'd returned to graduate school after a year of teaching high school Latin in a little Texas panhandle town, where I was only a few years older than the kids I was teaching and was replacing a local legend, a woman who had taught Latin for decades. Somehow I survived, but one year was enough to convince me that if I was destined to be a teacher, it would be in college rather than high school.

Looking back to those dark days, in the midst of the Vietnam war, political protest, youthful rebellion, and wide-spread civil unrest, Statius' tale of the war between Polynices and Eteocles, brothers and sons of Oedipus, seems an apt choice for close study. As I re-read it in translation (by Jane Wilson Joyce), I was reminded what a grim tale it is, almost unrelenting in violence and horror, until the very end, and even then offering scant hope. Statius lived through the horrors of Nero and the year of four emperors, and although the Flavians brought some respite, the lingering fears of disorder and destructive violence must have been impossible to shake off. Likewise, in his epic, the violence and hatred of the two Theban brothers are like a cancer that eventually consumes everything it comes in contact with. Such darkness lingers and overshadows every hope of a new day of enlightenment whether from Theseus's Athens or Domitian's Rome.

Even so the poem is a considerable work of art, and Jane Wilson Joyce's translation provides much helpful background to Statius' elaborate mythological context. I've lost that paper, which I recall only vaguely, but I can remember spending many hours and days scouring the text for references to fate and the fates, who play a central role in the story, as well as the many gods and demigods and personifications that urge the brothers and their hapless allies on to eventual destruction. Fate is a terrible thing for empires and for individuals. Sometimes the weight of destiny is hard to shake off.