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.