The Malevolent Alternate World of Fog in Statius’s Thebaid

ABSTRACT Statius’s epic poem the Thebaid abounds with eerie, ominous landscapes, as befits a text revolving around that which is nefas (“impious crime”). Statius utilizes fog in several of these landscapes as a means by which to indicate a breaking down of reality and morality through human moral pollution. Fog alters the space: It impairs the senses, defamiliarizes that which was known, and threatens a descent into chaos. Almost from the poem’s outset, Statius crafts such an effect through Tisiphone utilizing her “customary mist” to corrupt the house of Cadmus: a catalyst for the catastrophic events of the rest of the poem. This corruptive mist resumes in book five, with the narrative of the Lemnian women’s massacre of their men situated on a fog-covered Lemnos. Finally, the pollution of the river Ismenos in book nine stems from the fog of the ghosts of those slain clogging the waters.