Statius' poetry is no longer ignored or, when read, dismissed out of hand. This critical rehabilitation stems in large part from the editions, commentaries, translations and literary studies of his poetry that have appeared in the past twenty or so years, as well as from the intense interest in allusion or intertextuality that has reinvigorated the study of all Latin poetry – especially post-Virgilian epic. We now know that the Thebaid, for example, is indeed about something. But for all the progress that has been made, much remains to be done on Statius' poetic practices. In the hope of illuminating a constitutive feature of the artistic underpinning of the Thebaid, this book focuses on how Statius claims a distinguished place in the epic tradition for himself and his poem by reworking the poetry of Callimachus, the self-conscious artist par excellence.

The study of Latin poetry has, hopefully, moved beyond the point of anxiety about the importance of Greek – and especially Hellenistic – poetic predecessors. Attempts to single out and favour one part of the literary tradition at the expense of others are reductive and misguided; Damien Nelis has shown, for instance, that the Argonautica constantly informs the Aeneid and virtually mediates Virgil's use of the Homeric tradition. In the case of Statius, the son of a Greek poet from the Hellenized community of Naples, much less attention has been paid to his use of Greek literature than to his engagement with his Roman predecessors.