While Statius’ interventions in the poem seem to encourage a comparison between the poem’s characters and Virgil’s heroes, Chapter 2 shows that the Thebaid actually patterns its heroic narratives after some of the most politically charged myths of Ovid’s Metamorphoses, such as the stories of Cadmus, Perseus, Hercules, and Theseus. Statius’ descriptions of dysfunctional heroes, who re-tread the failure of their Ovidian ancestors to carry on the foundational mission of Virgil’s Hercules and Aeneas, seem to rework the anti-heroic paradigm set by Ovid’s Cadmus (Met. 3–4). By exploring the darker sides of the Aeneid’s gigantomachic discourse, these narratives open the Thebaid to a redefinition of traditional heroic paradigms that potentially questions the political significance of the heroes appropriated by the Flavian emperors in their refashioning of Augustan ideology. While offering new insights into Statius’ renegotiation of poetic independence from his predecessors, this exploration also illuminates the Thebaid’s sophisticated engagement with the material and ideological environments of Flavian Rome.

Chapter 1 focuses on the poem’s symbolic treatment of landscape and reads the Thebaid’s articulation of the relationship between human authority, nature, and wilderness as able to conceptualise power and reflect on important socio-cultural issues of Flavian Rome. While Statius’ praeteritio seems to cut off Ovid’s Theban histories from the poem, Tisiphone’s journey to Thebes, Polynices’ journey to Argos, Tydeus’ embassy to Thebes, Tyresias’ necromancy, and the march of the Argives against Thebes display episodes of destruction of the landscape by natural, divine, and chthonic forces that suggest Statius’ Theban universe being characterised by the same deceptiveness, tendency to chaos, and accessibility to infernal forces of the Metamorphoses’ world. By reworking the spatial narratives deployed by Ovid to critically rewrite the Aeneid’s geopolitical discourse, the Thebaid not only influences our understanding of the Augustan classics, but also provided ancient readers with a chaotic worldview that potentially challenged their perceptions of the narratives of re-established order and providence heralded by the urban and socio-cultural landscapes of Flavian Rome.

The Introduction offers an analysis of the poem’s proem to offer a first example of the methodology of the book and of Statius’ sophisticated engagement with Ovid. A discussion of the historical context in which the poem was composed warns readers about the risks of interpreting the Thebaid only in the light of the anti-Domitianic writings of Tacitus, Suetonius, and Pliny, suggesting the importance of non-literary and material sources. A critical overview of the scholarly debate on the Thebaid and the exploration of ancient reading habits – including the consideration of attestations of Ovidian stories in frescoes and monuments – suggests that intertextuality can consist of interactions of meanings (potentially independent of verbal allusions). Furthermore, texts can engage in dialogue with the semantics of both textual and non-textual narratives. Accordingly, the introduction suggests that the study of the Thebaid’s poetics and politics (broadly understood) involves the exploration of how different kinds of intertextual and intermedial interplays shape the poem’s engagement with both past literary models and the contemporary realities of Flavian Rome.

In contrast with the emphasis put on pietas and providentia by Flavian discourse, the Thebaid is the only Flavian poem that begins and ends without gods, much like Lucan’s Bellum Civile. However, Statius’ gods are described in Ovidian terms and use thought-provoking allusions to the Metamorphoses to challenge the readers’ poetic memory with distorted versions of their literary past. The ways in which Statius and his gods allude to and manipulate the Metamorphoses’ divine narratives, reworking Ovid’s coded use of celestial geographies, both mark a significant distance from Lucan’s epic universe and highlight the Roman significance of the Thebaid’s divine world. The gods’ attempts to legitimise their morally dubious actions by manipulating the readers’ understanding of the Metamorphoses not only shows the Thebaid’s sophisticated engagement with the former literary tradition but also exploits the traditional analogy between heavenly and Roman power to reflect on the Flavian emperors’ progressive sacralisation of the imperial institution and selective renegotiation of Augustan legacy in the tense religious atmosphere of post–civil-war Rome.

The Conclusion summarises the book’s main arguments and offers an analysis of the poem’s epilogue to reassess the post-Ovidian nature of the Thebaid. By reflecting on the new insights offered by the book into the poetics and the politics of different types of literary interactions, this analysis raises new questions in different fields, from Flavian and intertextual studies to the study of spatiality, suggesting ways to further advance the practical and theoretical study of ancient intertextuality and intermediality.