STATIUS, P. PAPINIUS, a poet and grammarian, who between the age of 13 and 19 was six times crowned as a successful candidate in the Greek poetic games at Naples. Dodwell conjectures that he was born A.D. 39, and died A.D. 86. On the strength of his reputation he went to Rome, where he arrived during the civil wars between Vitellus and Vespasian. Soon after his arrival, the Capitol was reduced to ashes; and seeing in this disaster a fine opportunity for artistic effect, he composed a poem, which was published almost before the cinders had ceased to smoke. This poem excited the admiration of the great men of the day, and, above all, of the emperor himself. Statius opened a school to teach Greek literature to the young nobles, and he also instructed the Salii and other priests in various branches of their duty with equal severity and success. In spite, however, of his literary labours, he seems to have left his son very little other patrimony beside the half-dozen faded chaplets of pine and laurel which he had won in the Neapolitan contests. The story that Domitian made him a tutor, and presented him with a golden crown, only rests on the authority of Maturantius, and may be a mere mistaken inference from the language of the Epicedion in patrem. All his works, even the famous poem on the Capitol, have perished, and he would probably have been forgotten but for the reputation of his son.