Thebaid

Tisiphone is a Fury, a monstrous underworld fiend in charge of avenging sins against the family. While she and her sisters, Alecto and Megaera, have mentions in earlier epics—Alecto has a particularly lengthy role in the Book 7 of the Aeneid—in the Thebaid Tisiphone begins to enjoy the standout role she will find in later imperial literature. Statius enjoys the character; he gives her a colorful and lengthy entrance description (Book 1, 97-122) and even promotes her to queen of hell. When Oedipus gives her his kingly approval, he signals the dominion of infernal deities over the universe of the Thebaid.

Tisiphone is a proxy agent and surrogate of Oedipus. In other epics the Furies are summoned only by gods—specifically by the Olympians—to enact their will. For example, Virgil’s Aeneid sees Juno summon Alecto for similar warmongering, but sends her back to hell when the job is done. In the Thebaid, however Tisiphone is summoned not by a god but by an impious mortal, and the Olympians apparently have no power over her movement. She even flies faster than Jupiter’s thunderbolt, the primary symbol of his power (Book 1, 92). Thus in the Thebaid, the powers of hell become the ultimate guarantors of autocratic desire. They represent a direct challenge to Olympian authority in a world gone topsy-turvy with madness.

Eteocles, one of the two sons of Oedipus, can be described as the primary antagonist of the work. When it is his turn to step down from the throne of Thebes, he refuses a peaceful transition of power while simultaneously claiming that he is a victim of injustice. He is almost cartoonish in his villainy; the very picture of a temperamental Roman emperor like Nero (or, less charitably, Domitian).

Eteocles is selfish, cruel, and arrogant. His capriciousness and cruelty are thin veneers over his internal insecurities and cowardice. He knows his subjects are unhappy, he knows his rule stands on the edge of a knife. He seems in every way the lesser man than his brother Polynices, but ultimately, he has the last laugh. In their final duel, when all hope seems lost, he stabs Polynices in the heart in a last act of trickery and treachery. Only in a world as perverse as Statius’s could Eteocles be properly mourned and Polynices ignored.

The exiled Polynices is, in theory, the more noble-hearted of the two sons of Oedipus. It is he who suffers the initial slight; Eteocles starts the war by denying him his turn on the throne, and Polynices’ subsequent siege of Thebes could be considered justifiable for this reason (though some might argue that civil war can never be justified and is innately sinful).

Unlike Eteocles, Statius gives us glimpses of Polynices showing love and devotion to friends and family—even tenderness. He loves his wife Argia, Adrastus’s daughter, and she loves him in return (e.g. Book 4, 74-92). He breaks down and weeps when his mother Jocasta visits the Argive camp (Book 7, 492-6); the way he calls her name over and over reminds us of the sympathetic young heroes Crenaeus and Parthenopaeus, who pitiably called for their mothers as they died (Book 9, 319-50; Book 9, 891-907). And Polynices is beside himself at the death of his pseudo-brother Tydeus in Book 9 (49-85), where he can barely be prevented from taking his own life in grief.

That being said, Polynices’ compassion is subsumed by the maddening influence of Thebes and his own disordered need for power. Even early on, Statius shows us worrying signs of Polynices’ potential for autocratic behavior—e.g. when he carefully marked his allies and enemies to clean house on his return (Book 2, 316-20). In his final battle with Eteocles, Polynices shows his true colors. He was virtuous, we learn, because he lacked the power of the throne. 

Tydeus, like the huntress Atalanta and her son Parthenopaeus, comes from the wilderness realm of Calydon. He wears the tusks and bristles of the famous mythical boar he slayed there. Like Polynices, Tydeus carries his own share of familial guilt. We first meet him as an exile in Book 1 after he murdered his brother (401-3). While Polynices and Tydeus initially fight—reenacting the struggle between Eteocles and Polynices—Tydeus soon becomes Polynices’ closest friend and ally, a pseudo-brother and replacement for Eteocles.

Tydeus is hot-headed and martially-oriented, much like his epic counterparts, Homer’s Achilles and Virgil’s Turnus. He is also one of the more morally upstanding and brave members of the Seven, almost to a fault. In Book 3, Tydeus will not stand for Eteocles’s faux-virtuous posturing as he steals the throne from Polynices (389-409). Similarly, when Lycurgus’s men want to kill Hypsipyle in Book 5, it is Tydeus who protects her (672-6).

But even Tydeus cannot escape the Thebanizing madness of the Thebaid, or the blood-guilt transferred to him by his relationship with Polynices. Once the epic’s upstanding hero, he does not see a heroic end. After a lengthy aristeia in Book 8, Tydeus is driven mad by a lust for carnage: All he wants is the decapitated head of his foe Melanippus, and dies munching on his skull. Recalling the cannibalistic brain-eating cyclops Polyphemus in Book 9 of Homer’s Odyssey, Tydeus is made into a monster by civil war, and dies feared and shunned by his own divine patron, Minerva.