The first character we meet at the beginning of Book 1, Oedipus is the driving force behind the plot of the Thebaid. On a broad level, it was his original sin of killing his father and marrying his mother which damned his entire house. On a specific level, it is his curse against Eteocles and Polynices which raises Tisiphone from the Underworld and sets the plot in motion.

Oedipus’s curse extends his ill fortune from his nuclear family into the state. Their private dysfunction now radiates outwards into the political life of not only Thebes but the wider Greek world. Notably, Oedipus does not just want to kill his sons: He wants to kill his city’s kings. Statius collapses the demarcations between the family and the state, much as personal squabbles in the Roman imperial household often collapsed the lines between private and public life.   

Oedipus is a liminal, contradictory figure. He is not quite living but not quite dead. He is a father who created his own brothers and sisters and a father who desires the death of his sons. While he is blind, he can also see reality most clearly, fitting into the work’s broader theme of blindness (literal and metaphorical).