Berkeley Undergraduate Journal of Classics

Statius' Thebaid, a Roman retelling of the infamous Oedipus myth, owes much to its literary forebears. The central tale the epic explores is borrowed from an ancient source: Greek accounts of an unlucky Oedipus and his unhappy offspring. But this first-century rendering is not a carbon copy of its antediluvian precedents, and Statius' treatments of fate, fortune, and human agency diverge distinctly from those of his most immediate narrative parallels. Indeed, it is in the Thebaid's departure from the causal framework of these assorted sources that its author's influence is most clear.

Throughout the epic's early books, the doubled determinism of Statius' literary inheritance gives way to a possibility of ethical independence for creator and character alike. This mirroring effect—the author's compositional agency is employed to endow his actors with more expansive moral options—serves within the text both to ennoble autonomy and condemn those individuals unwilling or unable to eschew inauspicious pasts. And while the poem's predetermined end leaves little room for autochthonous action (Statius' loyalty to his sources is incomplete but not absent), the Thebaid's first six books provide readers with a roadmap to an alternative arena of human conduct. By adopting and adapting narrative features evident in the works of Aeschylus, Apollodorus, and others, the Thebaid's creator crafts a moral message of his own.