Lydgate's Siege of Thebes is presented within the framing fiction of a supplementary Canterbury Tale, and, as one of the pilgrims, Lydgate tells the story of Statius' Thebaid as it had been reshaped by the romancers of the Middle Ages. Following the prologue (1-176),which is eminent as an imitation of Chaucer, Part I (177-1046) of the tale begins with the foundation of Thebes by King Amphioun and ends with the death of Oedipus and the abuse of his body by his sons, Ethiocles and Polymetus; Part II (1047-2552) relates the joint succession of the sons to the Theban throne and their contentions for supremacy; Part III (2553-4716) deals with the final destruction of Thebes as a result of their fratricidal struggles. But the poem is so long, it comprehends so many episodes, and its organization—alternating passages of narrative with passages of moralizing—is such that one critic described it as a rambling poem “with frequent moral digressions in the proper medieval manner,” in which “incidents follow one another with bewildering inconsequence,” while another asserted, to the same effect, that Lydgate in this poem “could no more deny himself a digression than could Browning.”
