Gabriel Laguna Mariscal earned his MA in Classical Philology at the Universities of Cordoba and Seville (1986) and his PhD in Classical Philology at the University of Seville (1991). He spent a year as a graduate student at Cornell University, and he was also a research assistant at Harvard. He was visiting professor at Cornell University and taught at the University of Extremadura before moving in 2002 to the University of Cordoba, where he is now Profesor Titular de Universidad (field: Latin philology).

Professor Laguna Mariscal specializes in the study of Latin poetry (Statius, Latin elegy and Catullus) with emphases on textual criticism, literary intepretation, and the Classical Tradition. His major publications are Estacio, Silvas III. Introduccion, edicion critica, traduccion y comentario (Madrid-Sevilla 1992), La obra amatoria de Ovidio. Aspectos textuales, interpretacion literaria y pervivencia (Madird 1996, with J.L. Arcaz and A. Ramirez de Verger), and Estudio literario de la poesia 67 de Catulo (Amsterdam 2002). He has published articles on Horace, Ovid, Statius, and the Classical Tradition; and he is Joint Editor of the jounal Exemplaria Classica (University of Huelva).

Publius Papinius Statius can be viewed as a Greek poet writing in Latin: he was born in the distinctively Greek city of Naples, and his father was a professional poet, winner in the Greek festival circuit, and also a teacher (grammatikos). Statius remembers him lecturing on a Greek poetry syllabus which invluded the nine lyric poets (five of whom Statius names, viz: Pindar, Ibycus, Alcman, Stesichorus and Sappho). This cultural background suggests that Statius was well acquainted with Greek lyric. It is my contention that the Silvae of Statius are deply influenced by a numver of generic patterns and topoi inherited from Greek lyric and more specifically from Pindar, who Statius mentions three times in the Silvae and regards as the most important of the lyric poets. Statius wrote four Silvae in lyric meters, although he learned his metrical technique more from Catullus and Horace than from the Greek lyricists.

The generic status of the Silvae has been much discussed and genres like epic, elegy, epigram or satire have been advanced as ageneric models for the Silvae. However, it was Greek choral lyric which provided Statius with a model for poetry written to celebrate a specific occasion or to praise a patron, sometimes at the addressee's request. A typical feature of Greek choral lyric, and of Pindar in particular, is the insertion of an aetiological myth into the middle of the ode. Statius proceeds in the same way in several of his Silvae. Statius also shares with Pindar an interest in the god Heracles as the main character of an aetiological myth. Furthermore, Statius takes other literary motives from Pindar, namely frequent allusions to athletic Games and nautical imagery. All these factors show that Statius intended to respond to Pindar and to choral lyric, not so much in terms of meter as in terms of generic aims and poetic procedures.