In the twenty-first canto of the Purgatorio, Dante and his guide Virgil encounter the poet Statius, who introduces himself to the Florentine master (Purgatorio 21.91-93): Stazio la gente ancor di là mi noma:    cantai de Tebe, e poi...

Statius, Volume 2: Thebaid, Books 1-7, and Statius, Volume 3: Thebald, Books 8-12, and Achilleid, by Publius Statius, edited and translated by D. R. Shackleton Bailey. Harvard, February 2004. $21.50 each Statius devoted twelve years to the composition of his Thebaid, the epic...

The Madness of Epic: Reading Insanity from Homer to Statius. By Debra Hershkowitz.(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998. Pp. xiii, 346. $80.00.) In this enormously learned first book, the author presents a series of essays on madness--in Vergil's Aeneid, in Homer, in Ovid's...