Born about 50 AD to a poet and his wife in the Bay of Naples, Publius Papinius Statius spent his early days following in his father’s footsteps by winning prizes in poetic contests around his hometown and Greece. After his name reached the roads of Rome, he caught the attention of wealthy patrons and the emperor Domitian, under whose sponsorship he wrote the great work of his life, Thebaid, over a twelve-year period. It was finally published in 92 AD, following twelve years of pain and torturous revision, or so he notes in Silvae 4.7, one of the short, occasional poems he wrote on days off from his gruelling epic. Nevertheless, the work paid off, and Statius enjoyed the reception of eager crowds for the rest of his life, in late Antiquity, and even throughout the Middle Ages, when he guided Dante throughout the world of Purgatorio, and although he has now been thunderstruck by his epic predecessors, Homer and Vergil, this state of being—smouldering, charred—is delectably indicative of Thebaid’s composition. How could a story centred around the war of Eteocles and Polyneices, these brothers who are also each other’s nephews and uncles on account of their horrendous bloodline, not be one of history’s most grotesque conflagrations?
(Bio by Phillip Dupesovski.)