Chapter XL: Book IV: King Adrastus decides on war in the third spring after Polynices

left Thebes. The leaders are Adrastus, Polynices, Tydeus, Hippomedon, Capaneus, Amphiaraus and Parthenopaeus. The description of the forces of these seven warriors against Thebes forms a dull catalogue of blended geography and mythology. At Thebes the dejected king consults the prophet Teiresias, who advocates recourse to the oracles of the dead in a forest of gloom comparable to Lucan’s eerie forest near Massilia. Statius conveys an appropriate sense of weirdness in his description:

At noontide yet and in the lonely night
Thro’ shadowland the damnéd ground exhales
Appalling battle-fumes: black figures rise—
The Earthborn dead—to urge their ghostly war.
The peasant flees his half-ploughed field unnerved,
And cattle come back to the steading mad.[1392]

From the sadness of the Argolic ghosts whom he evokes Teiresias infers an ultimate Theban victory. Bacchus, aiding Thebes, hinders the Argives’ march by a miraculous drought:

It was the hour whereat the panting day (_anhela dies_)
Raiseth the sun high as the mid-world peak,
When o’er the gaping fields a sluggard haze (_tardus uapor_)
Broods, and each forest lets the sunlight in.[1393]

And amidst this anguish of the solstice they are guided to the one spring remaining in the land by Hypsipyle, once of Lemnos and now a nurse to a king’s child Opheltes or Archemorus. Suspecting no danger, she leaves the child, in order to show them the water more quickly.

Book V. King Adrastus is desirous of knowing who this benefactress is, and nearly 500 lines are devoted to the fortunes, past and present, of Hypsipyle. She relates the crime of the Lemnian women in murdering their menfolk, the consequences to herself of having surreptitiously saved her father, and the visit of Jason in the Argo. Statius here trespasses on the subject of Valerius Flaccus’s _Argonautica_; and it may be noted that while in the _Thebaid_ Hypsipyle states that she was forced into a union with Jason, Valerius represents her as attracted into an amour by Jason’s looks.

The child Archemorus has been all this time left unattended, and another digression describes the venomous serpent which attacks him. Cries “like half-completed words in dreams” (_qualia non totas peragunt insomnia uoces_) are heard, and on her return the errant nurse finds the child dead. Against the furious anger of its father she is protected by the grateful Argives.

Book VI. The epic interest is considerably less in a book concerned first with the building of a funeral pyre and cremation of the child, and then with an elaborate account of the games in its honour—chariot-race, foot-race (“running,” remarks the poet, “is a useful accomplishment in war, if success fails one!”) quoits, boxing and wrestling.