Liv Reads Statius: The Thebaid (Part 5)

Let's Talk About Myths, Baby! Greek & Roman Mythology Retold

Liv Albert

History, Comedy, Arts

4.8 • 5.5K Ratings

🗓️ 10 June 2025

⏱️ 67 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

Liv reads The Thebaid, by Statius, translated by JH Mozley. The Argives stop in Nemea to hear the story of Hypsipyle of Lemnos (and, famously, Jason's first wife/victim) who shares the story of the Lemnian women and the time they got rid of all the men. Submit to the quarterly Q&A at mythsbaby.com/questions and get ad-free episodes and so, so much more, by subscribing to the Oracle Edition at patreon.com/mythsbaby

CW/TW: far too many Greek myths involve assault. I try to provide direct warnings when there is reference to anything with overtly traumatic themes but be aware that Greek mythology regularly features assault, death, and many other potentially triggering events. This episode in particular (along with the next reading of the Thebaid) features the death of a young baby.

This is not a standard narrative story episode, it's a reading of an ancient source, audiobook style. For regular episodes look for any that don't have "Liv Reads..." in the title! For a list of Roman/Latin names and who they generally refer to in the Greek, visit: mythsbaby.com/names The three names for the Fates/Moirae are Clotho, Atropos, and Lachesis; the names of the Furies/Erinyes are Tisiphone, Megaera, and Alecto.

Attributions and licensing information for music used in the podcast can be found here: mythsbaby.com/sources-attributions.

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Transcript

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0:00.0	Oh, hi there. Live here, speaking from the future. If you are keen to support this podcast,
0:05.6	if you are enjoying the episodes as you find them and you want to listen ad-free, check out
0:11.4	the Oracle edition on Patreon. It didn't exist way back when these early episodes were recorded,
0:17.5	but I'm telling you about it now. You can get all 700 and counting episodes of Let's Talk About Myths Baby,
0:24.6	ad free, along with so much more at patreon.com slash mythsbaby or via the link in the podcast description.
0:34.1	Thanks and happy listening.
1:11.4	Music description. Thanks and happy listening. Hello, this is let's Talk About Myths, baby.
1:19.6	And I am your host, Live back again with a reading of Staceous's Thebiod.
1:29.4	And this introduction, I am very intelligently recording right after reading the last one so that I can actually remember what was in it.
1:31.5	And so where we last left off, I'm not going to do the full recap.
1:35.9	Last episode, I did a bit more of a recap on like the full origin story.
1:40.0	So for now, we're just going to pick it right up where Pauliniquez is with the king of Argos,
1:46.7	Adrastis, and fellow hero Tideas.
1:51.2	And they are, well, they are working on deciding whether to go to war with Thebes,
1:58.4	aka, I mean, they are going to go to war with Thebes.
2:01.7	It's really just this question of like how it's going to happen, uh, what seers say yes or no. And so in, um,
2:09.5	in Argos, they had a, if I recall a bit more of it, a vague, uh, pronouncement that like,
2:15.3	it's not going to go that really well for you but you're going to do it anyway.
2:18.1	And then over in Thebes, we had this like really intricate scene with Tyresius, who is of course
2:24.9	like the most famous prophet of Greek myth, but specifically tied to Thebes and also seemingly
2:32.1	ageless because he is in every story regardless of
2:35.3	whether he should still be alive or not, given he is technically immortal.
	...

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