Thebais
Rome
c. 45 CE–c. 96 CE · Rome
Statius (Publius Papinius Statius; c. 45 – c. 96 CE) was a Roman poet of the Flavian period, active chiefly at Rome under the emperor Domitian. Born at Naples to a father who was himself a schoolmaster and poet, he competed in public poetry competitions and moved in imperial literary circles. His principal work is the Thebaid, a twelve-book epic on the war of the Seven against Thebes, composed over roughly a decade; he also left the unfinished epic Achilleid and the Silvae, a collection of occasional poems. The Thebaid exerted lasting influence on later Latin epic and on medieval and Renaissance literature, including Dante, who casts Statius as a character in the Purgatorio.
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Rome, on the Tiber in central Italy, grew from an Iron Age settlement into the capital of the Roman Republic and then of an empire that by the 1st century CE ruled the whole Mediterranean. Its Jewish community, attested from the 2nd century BCE, is among the oldest in Europe. Christian tradition holds that the apostles Peter and Paul died there, and the city became the seat of the popes. After the Western Empire ended in 476 it passed to Gothic kings, to Byzantium and then to papal rule as capital of the Papal States, until it became the capital of unified Italy in 1871. Vatican City, independent since 1929, lies within it.
Celsus, Valerius Maximus, Phaedrus, Seneca, Lucius Annaeus, Columella, Lucius Junius Moderatus, Curtius Rufus, Quintus
In the same place & time
Sages whose lives overlapped with Statius, P. Papinius (Publius Papinius)’s in the same cities, drawn from their recorded journeys.
Celsus, Valerius Maximus, Phaedrus, Seneca, Lucius Annaeus, Columella, Lucius Junius Moderatus, Curtius Rufus, Quintus, Pliny, the Elder, Silius Italicus, Tiberius Catius, Petronius Arbiter, Musonius Rufus, Persius, Quintilian, Titus, Lucan, Martial, Valerius Flaccus, Gaius, Plutarch, Domitian
The world in their lifetime
Thinkers and teachers of other traditions whose lives overlapped with Statius, P. Papinius (Publius Papinius)’s — a glimpse of the wider world they lived in. Drawn purely from recorded birth and death years.