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.