funeral flames
Divided, like the souls they carry.
The rival brothers ultimately engaged in single combat, and both fell. The body of Polynices was placed by mistake upon the funeral pile of Eteocles, and the flames rose upwards in diverging currents.
[10] Stephens's translation:
When Dirce blushed, being stained with Grecian blood.
[11] The dirce ran on one side of Thebes, the Ismenus on the other, and they afterwards united in a common stream. Both were mere watercourses, which were only filled by the rains of winter.
[12] The Thebans are subsequently represented by Statius as driven into the Ismenus by the Greeks, and the hosts which were killed or drowned were carried by the river into the sea.
[13] What hero, that is, of the famous seven who went up against Thebes to dispossess Eteocles for violating the compact to reign alternately with Polynices. The five persons whom Statius enumerates as joining with Polynices and Adrastus, king of Argos, are Tydeus, Amphiaraus, Hippomedon, Parthenopæus, and Capaneus.
[14] When Tydeus had received his death-wound from a javelin hurled by Menalippus, he gathered up his failing strength, and flung a dart by which he mortally wounded Menalippus in turn. Full of revengeful spite Tydeus begged that the head of Menalippus might be brought to him. He grasped it with his dying hand, gazed at it with malignant joy, gnawed it in his frenzy, and refused to relinquish his hold. This was "the rage of Tydeus," which Statius says the Greeks themselves condemned as exceeding the recognised latitude of hate.
[15] The prophet was Amphiaraus, who predicted that all who took part in the expedition, except Adrastus, would be destroyed. The earth opened while Amphiaraus was fighting, and swallowed up him and his chariot. Statius paints him sinking calmly into the yawning gulf, without dropping his weapons or the reins, and with his eyes fixed on the heavens.
[16] Hippomedon is made by Statius the hero of the conflict in the river Ismenus, where he at last succumbs to the god of the river. The piles of dead formed a dike, which turned back the waters.