A synthetic, concluding discussion addressing the relationship between Ur-Aeolic and Special Mycenean and providing a historical framework for, especially, the introduction of Aeolic language and culture (pre-Thessalian/Boeotian) into European Greece following the Bronze-Age collapses and for the spread of pre-Aeolians (Iron-Age Ahhiyawans) eastward into Cilicia.

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.