Literature and history

come. Hello and welcome to literature and history.

Episode 70, Rome's Forgotten Epic. This program is on the first half of the Thibayad, a 12 book long epic written by the Roman poet

Publius Papineus Stasis, and finished in about 92 CE, a story about men and women who lived a generation before the events of Homer's Iliad.

Literature is full of back corners and byways, works that were loved by one or two generations,

and then forgotten by posterity, or forgotten by an initial generation and then adored

by posterity only later, maybe, to be forgotten again.

Reputations rise and fall, and sometimes our own favorite works are obscure things that for whatever reason no one seems to know about.

In the case of Stacious and The Thebeiad, we encounter an epic poem that soared in popularity over the first century of its existence.

A thousand years later, the Thibayid's popularity continued, and the poem was circulated

widely alongside the Aniad and metamorphoses.

It inspired the influential French poem, the Roman de Teb, or romance of Thebes, which, along

with other antique romances of the 1100s, helped open the high Middle Ages to the texts of classical antiquity.

Dante loved Stacious so much that while Virgil guides the medieval Italian poet through

hell and the regions that lay beyond it, Statius becomes Dante's guide halfway through

Purgatorio, the second part of Dante's journey.

Stasis inspired works by Jeffrey Chaucer and John Lydgate.

And while Stacious was once regarded as being on roughly equal footing with Virgil and Ovid.

These days he has been relegated to the dustbin of classics courses, appreciated as a good long

sample of Silver Age Latin poetry, but hardly revered to the extent

that Virgil and Ovid and Homer are.

For those of us who come to Stacious late in studying classics, though, the poet who lived from about 45 to 96 CE is full of surprises.

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