This book about Statius' Silvae, a diverse collection of poems of praise, sets out to make large claims about Statius' ‘lesser poems of later growth’. Written as his epic poem the Thebaid was reaching completion, and published in two sets late in the reign of the emperor Domitian in ad 93 and 95, the Silvae have been often dismissed as ‘occasional’ and therefore trivial verse. The subject matter of the Silvae – banquets, the emperor's new statue, a new road – have been taken as evidence of the political and literary decadence of an age that no longer had anything important to say. Despite important work that has recently been done on the Silvae, they continue to be branded with this derogatory stereotype. Yet, as Gunn points out, ‘all poetry is occasional: whether the occasion is an external event like a birthday or a declaration of war, whether it is an occasion of the imagination, or whether it is in some sort of combination of the two … The occasion in all cases – literal or imaginary – is the starting point, only, of a poem’.