For scholars of Statius’ Thebaid, the Roman retelling of the very old “Seven against Thebes” saga, the Togail na Tebe (The destruction of Thebes), a Middle Irish prose adaptation of Thebaid, has long seemed to be a case of eccentric medieval nachleben. Classicists, like W.B. Stanford in his Ireland and the Classical Tradition, have commonly viewed Togail na Tebe and similar works—i.e. Togail Troí (The destruction of Troy), Riss in Mundtuirc (The tale of the necklace), In Cath Catharda (The civil war), Imtheachta Aeniasa (The adventures of Aeneas), Merugud Uilixes mac Leirtis (The wandering of Ulysses son of Laertes), et al.—as “flights of fancy” or “spates of rhetoric,” neither characterization particularly positive when speaking of Classical poetry. Yet the fruits of two recent scholarly movements—one in Classical Studies, the other in Celtic Studies—suggest that a more appreciative and nuanced assessment of the relationship between Statius’ Thebaid and Togail na Tebe is both possible and necessary. From the mid-eighteenth century until the last few decades, Classics scholars assessed Statius as inferior to his poetic peers, a view summed up clearly in H.E. Butler's opinion in 1909 that Statius is a superficial poet of the second rank and J.H. Mozley's comment that Statius’ “inequality as a poet is hardly necessary to speak [of].”