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Music description. Thanks and happy listening. Hello, this is let's talk about myths, baby, and I am your host, the original one, here with, while we're here with the final reading episode of Statius's Thebiad.

And, and wow, wow, because Theseus is coming in.

This is where we're getting, this is the perfect time for this final reminder about like kind of where this epic comes from. Because this is an epic written by a Roman period author about a iconically Greek myth. The kind of Greek myth that sort of has a similar infamy to the Trojan War, right?

Like this is the Battle of Thebes, the Seven against Thebes, these two brothers fighting each other for this kingdom, which has just gone through the whole Oedipus and Jocasta situation and everything else.

And so this myth is about as like historically mythologized, you know, in that way that the ancient

Greeks understood their, their mythos to be, you know, historical as well. So this is one of those

things. But then at the same time, this version of it, because it probably existed in countless other forms

long before, but they are lost to us outside of the Greek plays. We only have the Greek plays about

this, this sort of shared mythos of Thebes and these kings. And so we're talking about this

piece that is then written like, I don't know, 700 or so years after

the originating mythos is being developed and still probably 500 or so years after the plays,

which are the surviving Greek mythos that we have. And so what Staceous is able to work with is like

a thousand years of, of Theban kind of

mythos and Greek mythos. And so what we end up getting is this story that like mostly

resembles the myths that we have, but then simultaneously includes this ending, which we're going to get

to, which features Theseus, which we're going to get to,

...