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.