This book began as a dissertation on nefas in the Thebaid and has evolved into a monograph that interprets Statius' epic as a political critique of the Aeneid. Along the way a number of institutions and individuals provided invaluable help. My dissertation work benefited from the support of the Princeton Classics Department, an assistant mastership (under Bob Hollander and Ted Champlin) at Princeton's Butler College, a Ford Foundation dissertation fellowship, and the helpful counsel of those who at various times served on my dissertation committee: Elaine Fantham (director), Denis Feeney, Georgia Nugent, and Alessandro Schiesaro.

More recently, Jim O'Hara offered helpful suggestions as I was reconceptualizing the project. Generous support from Middlebury College in the form of academic leaves and funding for conference travel gave me the time to transform the dissertation into the present work. Eve Adler, Antony Augoustakis, Neil Bernstein, Charles McNelis, Karla Pollmann, and Marc Witkin read various chapters and gave me many helpful and insightful comments, as did the readers for Cambridge University Press. Tony Woodman offered wonderful advice at an important moment. Rebecca Scholtz and Sarah Miller, my research assistants at Middlebury, helped track down articles through interlibrary loan, and my advanced Latin class on the Thebaid in the Fall of 2004 carefully considered a number of my interpretive arguments. The hospitality of the Harvard Department of the Classics, where I was a visiting scholar during the academic year 2005–6, enabled me to finalize this manuscript efficiently and comfortably.