After Thebaid 4–7 and the many impediments to the Argive march and the commencement of battle narrative, the poem takes up its theme of fraternas acies at the end of the seventh book and vigorously pursues it in Thebaid 8–11. In the central books of his epic, Statius had pitted Callimachean aetiologies against martial themes, and the battles he finally relates may thus be expected to reflect an anti-Callimachean poetic agenda that exemplifies the narrative of violence and intestine warfare created in part by the Telchines. In this chapter, I argue that the accounts of the battles that dominate the second half of the Thebaid indeed do represent an anti-Callimachean, or a ‘Telchinic’, narrative strategy. Statius' descriptions of these heroic battles and deaths draw on themes and stories – such as the war between the Giants or stories from the so-called epic cycle – that both Callimachus himself and Roman poets who drew upon Callimachean authority had vilified or refused to address. Because his predecessors avoided such themes, there are few textual points of contact to be made between Statius and his antecedents. Nonetheless, the literary tradition briefly touches upon these themes and stories in ways that allow comparison.

This chapter focuses on the deaths of five of the Seven – Tydeus, Hippomedon, Capaneus, Parthenopaeus and finally Polynices – that are spread out over the final third of the epic.