II. QUINTILIAN: DECLAMATIONS AND ORATORS…

II. QUINTILIAN: DECLAMATIONS AND ORATORS

Spanish birth and Roman influences—Immediate predecessors, Africanus, Domitius Afer, Nonianus, Trachalus, Vibius Crispus and Julius Secundus—A professorial chair—Pathos of bereavements—Quintilian’s pupils—Lost works—Date of the Institutio Oratoria—Its scheme—Four prominent books—Importance of the child—Fundamentals—Transition from Grammar to Rhetoric—On oratory without training—Hard work essential—Moral and intellectual qualities involved—Subject-matter and arrangement in a speech—Attitude to technicalities—Practical application of oratory to law—Virtues of style—Mechanism of adornment—The best authors—Quintilian as critic—On delivery—Parallels with painting and sculpture—Attic, Asian, Rhodian—Latin compared with Greek—Eloquence and everyday language—Sententiae spoken and written—Another division of styles in oratory—The complete orator—Sources—Common sense—Aspects of Quintilian’s achievement—His style—Reputation through the centuries.

The two sets of declamations under Quintilian’s name—Characteristics—Persistence of rhetorical exercises—Rhetoricians and orators of the day.

QUINTILIAN

In M. Fabius Quintilianus[1133] we meet the premier teacher of imperial rhetoric and the greatest Latin authority upon education. The epigrammatist justifiably invoked him as

Quintilian, sovran guide of wayward youth, Quintilian, glory of the Roman gown![1134]

Belonging to Calagurris in Spain,[1135] he spent some part, perhaps a great part, of his early life in Rome, where his father may have been a rhetor.[1136] Quintilian recalls the trial of Cossutianus Capito in A.D. 57 as an event of his youth (nobis adulescentibus): he mentions also his youthful attendance on the aged speaker Domitius Afer,[1137] who died a year or more later. The conjectural date, then, for his birth would be about A.D. 35. If we accept the evidence of the scholiast on Juvenal,[1138] the distinguished grammarian Palaemon was one of Quintilian’s teachers; and the common impression has been that his education was mainly in Rome. He had studied observantly the methods adopted by speakers of the previous generation, and his own criticisms indicate some of the qualities that acted upon him. Among these predecessors he ranks Julius Africanus high, no doubt for his force (uires Africani, XII. x. 11), alongside of his old master Domitius Afer, for whom, although a detestable informer under Tiberius, he entertained a deep respect. He liked Afer’s bon mots and his ripeness (maturitatem): he recalls his treatise On Witnesses and a speech that circulated in his boyhood.[1139] Africanus, we learn independently, indulged in a metaphorical style of which it was remarked “Very fine, indeed; but what’s the point of it?”[1140] Among others who exerted influence on Quintilian was Servilius Nonianus, to whose able though discursive histories he had listened.[1141] Three recent orators he particularly mentions together.[1142] They are Galerius Trachalus, whose lofty style and lucidity appeared to more advantage when heard than when read; for, says Quintilian, “he was blest with a voice such as I never heard in anyone else and a delivery that would have done credit to the stage” (pronuntiatio uel scenis suffectura);[1143] Vibius Crispus, the notoriously successful informer whose pleasant style was apparently better suited to private than to public cases;[1144] and Julius Secundus, like Marcus Aper, one of the figures in Tacitus’s Dialogus, and prevented only by his premature demise from developing into a great orator.[1145]

While, however, rhetoric pervaded the atmosphere of Rome, we have no means of determining how much Quintilian owed in training to his own cultured home-province of Spain or whether he actually taught there. At some time or other he had gone back to Spain; for in 68 Galba brought him to Rome.[1146] He then entered on his career of teaching as a professor, holding what may be termed an imperially subsidized chair of rhetoric.[1147] His lectures earned him reputation, honours and wealth. Pupils surreptitiously pirated his discourses, and he himself was ultimately paid the compliment of elevation to the consulate.[1148] After retirement from public teaching, he devoted the evening of life to his work on the principles of oratory, dedicated to Victorius, or Vitorius, Marcellus. Domitian entrusted to him the tutorship of his two grandnephews, as we learn from the proem to his fourth book, where he combines a perhaps diplomatically unavoidable flattery of the emperor with the explanation that this mark of confidence in his educational power had stimulated him to provide more than a manual on rhetoric for the son of Marcellus and his own son. Before he had gone quite half-way through his literary task the author suffered the pangs of severe bereavement.

Striking the most personal note in his work, the proem to the sixth book turns from technicalities to the broken hopes of a sorrowing father. Addressed to Marcellus as the real begetter of the treatise, it tells how the author had counted on bequeathing the work to be the richest of inheritances for his son, then a promising lad of nine, but death had intervened. In a fit of human petulance he upbraids the gods for causing him to outlive all his dear ones. He had already lost his young wife in her nineteenth year, then one boy of five, and now the surviving boy—a clever child on whose accomplishments in Greek and Latin, and patience during illness he dwells tenderly, so that amidst his apostrophes of grief and Stoic reflections we are drawn nearer to him than anywhere else in his writings. In spite of a few epigrammatic antitheses, true to the rhetoric of the age, one cannot but be touched when he begs indulgence if mourning should make his energy flag, finds his best security in the thought that fortune has left herself no further chance of afflicting him, and bespeaks a kind attitude to labours that are not selfish but altruistic in aim. “This work, alas, like the acquisitions of my fortune, I shall leave for others than those for whom I designed it.”[1149]

The first ten chapters of the second book enable us to picture the sort of exercises prescribed by Quintilian in his apparently rather select academy. These were written themes to be criticized; reading lessons in historians and orators, with exposition and questioning; choice passages for committal to memory; courses on the theory of rhetoric—all leading to the supreme test of the declamation. A rhetorical instructor evidently led a busy life. Help had to be given to pupils in laying out a scheme of treatment, or marshalling arguments; the prepared speech had to be listened to and criticized; models for comparison had to be composed by the master. In addition, Quintilian took engagements outside school: he gave public exhibitions of his skill,[1150] and he accepted briefs.[1151] Many, therefore, who were not formally pupils came under his influence. The younger Pliny mentions him as his teacher.[1152] On the other hand, there is no proof that Tacitus or Juvenal attended his school. It is not impossible that the former, who began his literary career with a flavour of Ciceronianism had, like his friend Pliny, studied under Quintilian; and passages in Juvenal,[1153] which look like reminiscences of Quintilian, may imply acquaintance with the Institutes of Oratory as a book or with its author as an instructor. But here positive statement is not defensible. Nor can a date be assigned for his death: it is usually placed before A.D. 100.

Of his lost works the most valuable would have been his investigation into decadence in oratory, De Causis Corruptae Eloquentiae.[1154] This was a subject sure to engage the attention of criticism. Petronius, in his romance, had put his finger on the weak spots in declamations, and Tacitus handled the question in the Dialogus. Quintilian’s attitude, we can infer, was that of the expert who recognized the evil effects of unpractical exercises divorced from the concerns of ordinary life and marred by artificial figures of speech.[1155] To Tacitus’s genius the same problem presented itself in its historical setting: political developments at Rome were no longer, he realized, such as to foster the ancient greatness in oratory. Among Quintilian’s orations there was only one which he published himself—an early effort defending Naevius Arpinianus and admittedly issued from ambitious motives.[1156] But there were others which admirers had taken down imperfectly in shorthand and circulated under his name with a minimum of the real Quintilian in them (minimam partem mei habent). We cannot tell whether such collections included the two other cases which he definitely specifies—his speech for Queen Berenice and that for a widow alleged to have forged a will.[1157] There was, besides, a pair of unauthorized publications of his lectures based on notes taken by enthusiastic students—the one on a two days’ discourse; the other on a longer course.[1158] These appeared under Quintilian’s name, but, as they are stated to be libri artis rhetoricae, they can hardly be identified with either collection of Declamationes which used to be ascribed to Quintilian and which fall to be noticed later.

His single extant work, the Institutio Oratoria, in which he gathered up an educational experience of twenty years, was undertaken only after prolonged resistance to requests made to him in his newly won leisure: it took over two years to write, and even then, conscious of Horace’s precept against hurried workmanship, he delayed publication, as he explains to his publisher Trypho, from a sense that the two years had been given more to collection of material than to style.[1159] If, as is usually thought, the twenty years of teaching mean years spent in Rome after his return in 68, then his retirement happened in 88, and the earliest date for the issue of the treatise would be four or five years afterwards, 92 or 93.[1160] In the other direction, the latest date must fall before Domitian’s death in 96.

The author’s outline of his scheme in the twelve books is as follows.[1161] Book I treats preliminary education from infancy; II, the initial training under a professor of rhetoric. This leads to a definition of rhetoric in which the essential divisions are inuentio (getting the right subject-matter) and elocutio (use of the right style). Five books (III-VII) are assigned to inuentio with the allied subject of dispositio (arrangement), and then four (VIII-XI) to elocutio with memoria (memorizing of a speech) and pronuntiatio (delivery). XII, as a culmination to the work, draws the picture of the finished orator.

The books that stand out distinctively are the first, in which Quintilian’s greatness as an educator is apparent—just where he would have wished it to appear—at the earlier stages of education; the second, in which he exhibits his method of teaching rhetoric; the tenth, in which his list of authors suitable for study is accompanied by brief literary judgements, many of them since grown familiar and famous; and the twelfth, which conveys his final conception of the trained speaker. But all possess value far beyond what might be looked for in a treatise on oratorical instruction. This is largely due to the width of the author’s purview. To educate a speaker was to educate a Roman gentleman; and capable speaking was expected of all in public life. The training too was in much more than in speaking. It had to build up character, and to embrace the liberal arts.

Quintilian’s thoroughness impress one from the outset. This is what gives to the first book its permanent appeal. In education the initial steps are of vital importance; for early influences leave an indelible imprint.[1162] No detail, therefore, is overlooked that might count—the speech of a child’s nurse, parental example, manners of slaves, ways of learning the letters, attention to syllables, or practice in saying hard words. The last contributes to clear enunciation—so much neglected in English education that we are fast becoming a nation of bad readers. The principle of the Kindergarten is foreshadowed in the dictum that mental work ought at the start to wear the shape of amusement. Quintilian offers sound reasons for preferring school to the home as an educational instrument: he believes in healthy emulation among boys and in the bond of initiation into common pursuits. “Ambition,” he remarks, “may be a vice, but it is often the root of virtues” (I. ii. 22). The best teacher must be secured even for the rudiments, but the standard should never be beyond the pupil’s capacity—the vessel must not be overfilled. One section is concerned with testing intelligence and temperament, to which instruction is to be adapted. Greek is prescribed from the beginning of the school-course, as well as the use of standard authors, even though the pupil may not appreciate them fully till later in life. Wider than in modern times, “Grammar,” we have seen,[1163] embraces both the correct use of language and the study of literature. Linguistic foundations cannot be dispensed with: “without them the superstructure will collapse” (quidquid superstruxeris corruet, I. iv. 5). The warning about the danger of showy haste is as necessary now as in the first century. “This advice” (to study grammar), he says, “would be superfluous, were it not that most teachers, in their pretentious hurry (ambitiosa festinatione), begin with what should come later, and, through a preference for parading their pupils’ attainments in regard to the more brilliant parts of their subject, actually hinder their progress by the short cut” (I. iv. 22).

When, after careful grounding in language, the young scholar reaches literature—where Homer and Virgil make the best reading-books—it will be found that, as honey is drawn from various blooms, so eloquence needs many arts for its support. There must be geometry and at least some philosophy; besides, ancient poetry could not be understood without some knowledge of music and astronomy. Before the book closes, a fine plea is made for breadth of training, and for the love of accomplishments for their own sake. Concurrent teaching of varied subjects is advocated, because change of study stimulates mental activity, and there is a tendency to underestimate the power of boys to bear the strain. For many studies there will never be more free time than in boyhood; we are apt to forget this and “shield laziness under the excuse of difficulty” (difficultatis patrocinia praeteximus segnitiae, I. xii. 16). Protesting against mercenary estimates of a subject, Quintilian says, “I don’t want to have a reader who is going to count up how his training is to pay him” (I. xii. 17).

The age for beginning the higher study of rhetoric, in contradistinction to grammar, must depend not on years but on attainment (II. i. 7). As the type of exercise in vogue has been indicated in the chapter on Roman education and in the sketch of Quintilian’s academy, it need not detain us. But attention may be drawn to the sanity of the pronouncements on the need for ability, character, good temper and patience in a teacher; on the mischief done to pupils by excessive applause or excessive severity; on the promise indicated by exuberance of style; on the correction of written work; on test-questions to make pupils think for themselves; on the discussion of blemishes and excellences in speeches chosen for study; on the deleterious influence of the proud parent; on the affection due by pupils to teachers who are “the parents of the mind” (parentes mentium, II. ix. 1). Regarding declamations it is worth observing that Quintilian, while he recognizes their weaknesses and suggests improvements (II. x. 9), will not go the length of forbidding the imaginative type of theme.

There is a passage that implicitly states the case for such a work as the Institutio Oratoria, by answering the question why the untrained in speaking are sometimes thought more effective than the trained:

“An untrained speaker (ineruditus) employs abuse too openly and too often, even to the peril of the party whose case he has taken up, and to his own peril as well. At the same time, such a line gains a reputation, for people like very much to hear things said that they would never have consented to say themselves. A speaker of this sort still less escapes the other peril that lies in style: he makes frantic efforts (conatur perdite), with the occasional result that, while invariably casting about for the extravagant (nimium), he may chance on a fine effect (aliquid grande); but it is of rare occurrence and does not compensate for undoubted faults. For this reason, the uninstructed sometimes appear to have the fuller flow, because they say everything: trained speakers feel the need of both selection and restraint (et electio et modus). There is the further point that untrained speakers abandon the task of proving what they have asserted! By this means they avoid what our decadent law-courts (corrupta iudicia) consider dryness of question and argument; and they seek solely the kind of thing calculated to gratify the ear of the court with spurious delights. Besides, their very epigrams (sententiae), which they make their one great aim, are the more striking because the whole context is poor and mean—it is the case of flashes that show brighter not in shadow, as Cicero has it, but in downright darkness. So then one may call them geniuses to one’s heart’s content, provided it remains clear that such praise would be an insult to a really eloquent man.”[1164]

So much for the justification of his task. Full success, he is convinced, is the fruit of hard work devoted to a difficult subject of wide ramifications; and he can only congratulate, he remarks ironically, those persons who are eloquent without any trouble or system or study (sine labore, sine ratione, sine disciplina). The leisure secured by his retirement from teaching and pleading while his services were still in demand (dum desideraremur) will enable him to formulate principles likely to help genuine students.[1165] To be sure, an absolutely fixed system is impracticable: rhetoric would be a simple matter, if even a division of it were capable of being summarized in one brief instruction.[1166] But, subject to certain rights of deviation, rules there must be:

It is upon great labour, continual study, varied practice, repeated experiments, profound sagacity and ready resource that the art of speaking depends. But it is also assisted by these rules, provided they point out the straight road instead of one fixed wheel-rut (orbitam); for if anyone believes it a sin to deviate from it, he needs must submit to the slow progress of a tight-rope walker! So we often quit the main military road, allured by a short cut.... The orator’s task is of wide extent and variety, fresh almost every day, and on it the last word will never have been said.[1167]

So Quintilian addresses himself to the details of his work with a dignified consciousness of its utility and indeed of its divine call—for speech, the God-given endowment which distinguishes man from other beings, undeniably deserves assiduous cultivation.[1168] Defined as bene dicendi scientia, rhetoric, in addition to natural ability and expert training, demands a moral basis. A good character is insisted upon over and over again as an essential qualification of the orator, who is defined in Cato’s familiar words as uir bonus dicendi peritus.[1169] Without sound morality the glib speaker endangers both the community and his own soul. Equally indispensable to a great orator is wide knowledge. As shown in the chapter on Roman education, Cicero actually recommended omnium rerum magnarum atque artium scientiam, while Quintilian’s requirements are more moderate—sed mihi satis est eius esse oratorem rei de qua dicet non inscium,[1170] i.e. he must study the subject on which he is to speak. This explains why during schooldays, though the pupil’s individual bent is to be taken into account, yet some breadth of training should be compulsory for all. It will be observed that this raises the question of the educational profit of training in subjects which a student may not like. We have seen that acquaintance with subjects like music, geometry, astronomy, outside the professional training was recommended at an earlier stage: and the importance of ethics, physics, dialectic, law and history could not be overlooked.[1171] Purely vocational specialization for an orator would defeat itself.

At the outset of the five books allotted to matter and arrangement (III-VII), Quintilian, conscious that technicalities are unavoidable, gives warning that there will be much “wormwood and little honey” (parum mellis et absinthii multum). To his credit, he is not so dry as he promised to be. Certainly we are no longer interested in deciding into how many divisions the status of a case should fall. On the other hand, it would be too much to expect him entirely to renounce or even denounce the multa in nominibus differentia (III. vi. 47) as futile verbiage; for that would be opposed to the loyal spirit which led him to record, with merciful reductions, the terminological exactitudes used by generations of predecessors. We may, then, rest content in the confidence that he must have writhed under a boredom which he could not end. Technicalities notwithstanding, there is much of value. We would not be without his sketch of Greek and Roman writers on rhetoric,[1172] which marks his interest in the past of his subject and constitutes an ancient bibliography on it as well as some indication of his sources. It is good to be told that of the two schools Apollodoreans and Theodoreans, the former represented an older type of oratory and were specially keen on narratio, the statement of a case; also, that Apollodorus taught Augustus, whereas Theodorus taught Tiberius. Again, when, after adopting the ancient tripartite division of oratory into laudatory, deliberative, and judicial, Quintilian adduces among deliberative exercises a technical term like prosopopoeia,[1173] his remarks have the refreshing merit of showing his sound educational preference for a difficult thing. Prosopopoeia was a dramatic exercise in character—a declamation where the speaker assumed the personality of the supposed deliberator; and Quintilian holds it to be the most useful of exercises for the excellent reason that it involves double the amount of work and develops the powers of future poets and historians.

Another testimony to his concern for the practical application of oratory is found in the predominance of its judicial aspects. In none of the parts of a speech, prooemium or exordium, narratio, probatio, refutatio, peroratio, do we ever seem far from the law-courts, so that interesting and sometimes entertaining light is thrown on criminal and civil procedure. Illustrations are drawn from the handling of arguments in Cicero’s speeches; and various problems are threshed out, such as the conciliation of a judge, the countering of an opponent’s pleas, or the admissibility of more than one answer to a charge. We are reminded of risks in a digression (egressio) which is sandwiched between the statement of a case and the enumeration of points to be dealt with (propositio). We recognize the virtues of a narratio when told that it must above all be understood, remembered, believed. Further, we learn the autobiographical fact that Quintilian was an adept at narratio, with the consequence that, in lawsuits where the pleading was shared among several advocates, he was usually asked to present the case—a circumstance which he mentions with a justifiable Apollodorean pride.

This legal atmosphere prevails throughout the fifth book in the treatment of proof, oaths, witnesses and rebutting arguments; and again through the sixth on perorations, sway of emotions, and the altercatio. Fortunately other matters are touched on. In one passage[1174] he denounces the absence of solid reasoning—a want of virility to his mind—which weakened declamations composed merely to attract notice. They are like foils with the button on (praepilatis), and have no sinews (neruis carent). Among the emotions he examines laughter,—a perennial problem for the psychologist—and on it is prudent enough to confine himself to a single chapter, recognizing the merits of the facetious and illustrating various types of pleasantry more or less funny. The attempted classification of jokes foreshadows no solution of the origin of laughter on the basis of psychoanalysis or otherwise: he is frankly puzzled: “a joke is appreciated not by the reason but by a mental impulse perhaps inexplicable.”[1175] The seventh book—on arrangement—largely reflects the management of actual lawsuits. Here the process of thinking out points in a case recalls to the author several times his own practice. There is one most instructive example of the different lines on which the same academic case may be argued.[1176]

With four books to write on style (elocutio) and delivery (pronuntiatio), Quintilian declares that difficult portions of his work are still ahead. Good style is not compassed by taking thought: as he mischievously remarks, “it has happened that some most painstaking authors of manuals have themselves been very far away from eloquence.”[1177] Mere attention to words (cura uerborum, VIII. pr. 18) is not enough, for real style is not a matter of showiness. Solicitude over verbal niceties quenches the ardour of imagination.[1178] Yet the right sort of labour earns its reward: “no appropriate word will be lost by the man who first of all has learned the principles of eloquence, and by prolonged and judicious reading has acquired a plentiful stock of words, and applied thereto skill in arrangement; and who, besides, has strengthened all by abundant practice, so as to have it constantly at hand and before his eyes.... When our words are sound Latin, significant, elegant and appropriately arranged, why need we trouble further?”[1179]

One of the positive virtues in style is its due embellishment (ornatus); for the attainment of correctness and perspicuity is but to have avoided faults.[1180] Such adornment should be virile, noble and chaste: it must not court an effeminate flightiness or artificial showiness: it ought to be radiant, as it were, with healthy blood and vigour. And so ornatus leads him to its mechanism in “tropes” (including metaphor, metonymy, irony, hyperbole) which he distinguishes from the “figures” of Book IX. These figures depend either on the thought (like interrogation, personification, apostrophe) or on language (climax, paronomasia, antitheton or balance).

The chapter on the cultivation of style (de compositione, IX. iv.) is of vital importance for the student of Latin. It deals with charm in style, with the compact and the loose type of prose (uincta or contexta, and soluta),[1181] order of words, jarring of consonants, final -m, jerkiness produced by a run of monosyllables, and prose-rhythm. It is an appropriate echo that the book should end with the Ciceronian clausula “esse uideatur.”

The long opening chapter of Book X contains Quintilian’s list of the best authors for study, first Greek and then Latin, in the provinces of poetry, drama, history, oratory and philosophy. When he comes to Roman writers, he adds satire, and makes the well-known claim, satura quidem tota nostra est, which, though fully defensible in one sense needs in another as much qualification as Horace’s statement that Lucilius depends entirely on old Attic comedy. In estimating Quintilian’s judgements, it should be remembered that they are primarily made from an oratorical standpoint. The chapter is not a piece of pure literary criticism. There is in it, as regards the Greeks, a good deal of traditional appreciation according to Alexandrian and Pergamene canons, and in many of the brief findings we feel that Quintilian has missed saying the right thing. Again, his attitude to history shows the limitations of his period. Here he is not advanced enough to conceive of history as a science as well as an art. Influenced by the prevailing tendency to compose history on rhetorical lines with purple patches and poetic descriptions, he holds it to be proxima poetis and in a sense “poetry free from the shackles of metre” (carmen solutum, X. i. 31). Nor is there any dream of a philosophy of history; there is no testimony to its power of guidance in the hands of the greatest masters; and when he avers that, in contrast with forensic oratory, it has nothing to do with proof, he ignores the part played in historical investigation by the weighing of documents and evidence. All the same, on the purely stylistic aspect of history, he has said memorable things, like densus et breuis et semper instans sibi Thucydides, dulcis et candidus et fusus Herodotus, or his ascription of lactea ubertas to Livy and of breuitas as well as immortalis uelocitas to Sallust.[1182]

The traditional element in his criticisms, particularly on Greek literature, lessens his claim to originality. Broadly similar to Dionysius of Halicarnassus in order of treatment, he probably used both his work περὶ μιμήσεως and some of its sources.[1183] Though he does not name him in Book X, he does so elsewhere more than once. But it should be remembered that he had open access to an extensive corpus of Greek criticism with its canonical lists of authors arranged in different branches of literature. Such literary canonization received the sanction of renowned authorities like Aristophanes of Byzantium and his follower Aristarchus; and similar lists issued from Pergamum. The stiffness of treatment and fixed habit of comparison which are the outcome of this inheritance leave their mark upon Quintilian: he is too starched in his grouping and too fond of finding for Greek writers a supposed analogue among the Romans. In respect of Latin literature, he is freer to employ his own reading and his own judgement. Though he had at least three well-known predecessors in the field of Latin criticism—Varro, Cicero and Horace—who were available, still here he speaks more clearly for himself.[1184] There is no mistaking either his genuine predilection for Cicero,[1185] whom he only occasionally criticises and then apologetically, or his almost consequential dislike of Seneca as master of a newfangled but unhealthily attractive style in prose.[1186]

Neat though many of the verdicts on Roman writers be, they are, except in fuller critiques like those on Cicero and Seneca, too perilously adapted for unintelligent repetition by label-lovers. What purports to be criticism in a nutshell contains so small a fraction of the whole truth as to be virtually false or positively useless. It takes us, for instance, but a little way to find Lucretius put alongside of Macer for graceful handling of material, with the qualification that the latter is “tame” (humilis) while the former is “hard reading” (difficilis); and, while among elegiac poets Tibullus may properly be singled out for smooth finish, it is extraordinarily unsatisfying to read the added words “there are some who prefer Propertius.” Equal disappointment is felt on realizing that Catullus is regarded as a bitter lampoonist rather than a lyric poet. Yet within his limits Quintilian has given us much to be grateful for. It is illuminating to read the comparison of Ennius to the venerable oaks of the forest; or the opinions that Julius Caesar, granted more time for forensic oratory, would have rivalled Cicero; that Ovid was too much in love with his own genius; and that Lucan for all his fire, impetuosity and epigrams, must be frankly reckoned a model for orators instead of poets. It is of service also to have testimony to the excellence of lost plays like Varius’s Thyestes and Ovid’s Medea. Quintilian’s view was that Latin tragedies might rival Greek, but that in comedy Rome was crippled.[1187]

The treatment of memoria in Book XI gives an opportunity for the record of some wonderful powers of memory. Pronuntiatio (or delivery), which follows, is, we are told, termed “action” by most authorities, “but it appears to derive the one name from the voice, the other from gesture.” On this appeal to ear and eye, Quintilian lays great stress: “personally, I should be inclined to declare that language of but moderate quality, if recommended by forcible delivery, will produce a more powerful effect than the most excellent language, if deprived of that advantage.” He contemplates in language a standard of correct, clear, elegant Latin pronunciation free from anything rustic or foreign,[1188] and in gesture a convincing fitness to the thought. “If gestures and looks are at odds with our speech, if we utter melancholy words with a cheerful air, if we assert anything in a tone of denial, it is not merely impressiveness that is lacking to our words, but credibility as well.” Besides, there must be restraint: to prance about while speaking is to “overdo the business”—the bad habit of the professor who was jocularly asked how many miles he had declaimed![1189]

It is in the last book that the moral dignity of Quintilian’s conception is best revealed. In the definition of an orator as “the good man skilled in speaking,” the indispensable requisite is put first: whatever academic labour may be involved in gaining the prescribed skill, he must before everything be good. “This is of moment,” he insists with a Roman grauitas, “because, should the oratorical power furnish the equipment of wickedness, then nothing would be more ruinous than eloquence alike to national and to private interests.” He might be expected to share Hecuba’s contempt for Odysseus as the glib orator, prepared to sacrifice every consideration to please the majority.[1190] This stress on morality is so emphatic that his occasional concessions regarding a speaker’s avowal of the truth almost wear the guise of Macchiavellian lapses.[1191]

The tenth chapter of Book XII is full of value. Brief parallel surveys of Greek painting and sculpture faintly raise the hope that an attempt might be made, as in Lessing’s Laocoon, to demarcate the provinces of painting and literature. What in fact they lead up to is an instructive glance at dominant qualities in different Roman orators, and at the change in prevalent opinion about Cicero’s speeches. Once upon a time censured by hostile critics as florid and exuberant, they had come in Quintilian’s day to be thought meagre and dry. Thereupon we get the famous division of oratory into three traditional styles—the restrained Attic, the inflated Asian and the intermediate Rhodian. With the grammarian Santra’s explanation of Asianism, as due to the circumlocutions used by imperfect speakers of Greek on the Asiatic coast, he cannot agree. More plausibly he refers differences in oratory to national and racial differences in speaker and hearer. “Attic” one may cheerfully pronounce the best style; but there is Attic and then again Attic. In an admirable passage he picks out types of Attic orators, among them Demosthenes and Pericles, to remind us how distinct in quality they were.

But now, as to what vitally concerns him, Latin eloquence (Latina facundia), he feels it cannot be properly discussed except from a comparative standpoint. How does the Latin language appear when placed side by side with Greek? Here two thoughts may present themselves to the reader, first, that Quintilian possessed the great advantage which Aristotle as a critic did not possess, and the later author of the Περὶ ὕψους did not use to any extent, of having the best of both Greek and Roman literature on which to form a judgement, and, second, that some authorities have tended to overstate Quintilian’s homage to Greek. On the latter point it may be said that this passage shows the Roman critic endeavouring to hold the balance evenly between a well-grounded traditional reverence for Greek and a patriotic confidence in the virility of Latin. No modern can hope to estimate either Greek or Latin sounds exactly with Roman ears, or to appreciate fully the counts on which he finds Greek more pleasant than Latin. He dislikes, for example, the letter f, particularly in the combination fr: he prefers the ringing final -ν of Greek to the “lowing sound” of the Latin -m. It is, however, easier to follow his complaint about the paupertas which involved Latin in repetitions unneeded by Greeks, and he is entitled to note the rich variety of Greek dialects. Yet he is not dismayed:

He who is to demand from the Latins the acknowledged grace of Attic speech must give me the same sweetness in utterance and equal supply of words.... The less help our language gives, the more we must battle in the production of thought. Sublime and varied conceptions must be brought forth. All the emotions should be stirred, and our speech illumined with the gleam of metaphor. We cannot be so graceful as the Greek: let us be more vigorous. We are defeated in subtlety: let us prevail in weight.[1192]

A curious anticipation of the Wordsworthian doctrine of poetic diction in the preface to the Lyrical Ballads appears in the contention next examined—that there is no natural eloquence except in the language of ordinary life.[1193] Quintilian furnishes a sensible answer in his insistence on the fundamental difference between the common language and the speech of an eloquent man. If the theory were correct, then the orator’s sole task would be to apply plain words appropriately, whereas his duty is the wider one of delighting, touching, influencing hearers, and for such aims he must employ other aids—aids that are also granted to man by nature. Exercise is as needful and natural for the orator as for an athlete; and so in all nations one man is recognized as more eloquent than another.

Passing to the striking thoughts (sententiae) characteristic rather of Latin than of Greek oratory, Quintilian holds they are admittedly serviceable within limits—if they bear on the case, are not overdone, and contribute to a speaker’s success.[1194] They have the merit of being impressive in a single hit (uno ictu), memorable for brevity, and effective by their charm (ipsa breuitate magis haerent et delectatione persuadent). Now are these ingenious flashes of epigram permissible in a spoken but not in a written oration? On this question, while he owns that the spoken speech may have to be somewhat cut to fit it for permanent book-form, Quintilian yet makes the significant declaration that ultimately an identical law of criticism must rule: “I consider it one and the same thing to speak well and to write well.”[1195] The broad validity of this is not impaired by special circumstances like the necessity for addressing a popular jury or adapting one’s pronunciation to suit an illiterate witness.

Thereupon another threefold division of styles is given without any explicit attempt to relate it to the previous geographical triad. The three types are the plain (ἰσχνὸν), to instruct; the grand (ἁδρὸν), to move; and the intermediate or flowery (ἀνθηρὸν), to charm.[1196] We are quickly assured that the three have many subdivisions and gradations of shade, and that eloquence cannot be confined rigidly by classification. All varieties have their uses: besides, an orator is not always equal to himself. One thing is clear—it is a mistake to believe that a corrupt and flamboyant type is sure to be popular.[1197] In any case, the true orator will achieve his supreme effects with the ease that comes to the successful climber above the zone of difficulty, and he will respect that sense of due restraint (modus) without which nothing is praiseworthy or beneficial.[1198] Similar judgement (ratio) is applicable to all aspects of oratory, where, as in Aristotelian ethics, virtue lies in the mean (utriusque ultimum uitium est).[1199]

Towards the end, he not unnaturally thinks of the judgements which his work may encounter. To the best of his ability, he has put his knowledge at the service of those desirous to learn: “and it is enough for an honest man to have taught what he knew.”[1200] But he anticipates criticism on his exacting demand that the same individual shall combine the highest ethical qualities with the highest intellectual proficiency based on extensive academic study—a sort of Admirable Crichton in oratory. If it be objected that his conception is too ideal, that it implies too much work, and that there is no time for a training so elaborate, then the answer to each count is ready: “let those who incline to despair reflect how great is the ability of the human mind, and how capable of realizing its aims....[1201] Next let them think how noble is the object, and that no toil should be shirked with such a reward in view”; then in a Senecan tone he adds, “it is we ourselves that make our time short; for how little do we devote to study! The empty ceremonial call filches some hours, leisure squandered on gossip other hours, public shows and conviviality others still.”[1202] He is conscious of an aim transcending all this as he continues: “let us pursue wholeheartedly the true majesty of eloquence, than which the immortal gods have granted nothing better to mankind, and deprived of which all things remain dumb, lacking illumination for the present as well as remembrance among posterity: let us unceasingly strive after the highest, for so doing we shall either attain the summit or at the least behold many below ourselves.”[1203]

Quintilian’s eclectic erudition was drawn from wide reading in Greek and Latin. A full list of its sources would almost amount to a catalogue of rhetorical literature.[1204] He was conversant with Greek theories, old and new, on his subject. Both Aristotelianism and Stoicism exerted influence upon him; Chrysippus[1205] contributed important elements to his educational doctrine; and there is ground for believing that he studied the critical works of learned Greeks who had lived in Rome under Augustus, like Caecilius Calactinus (i.e. from Cale Acte in Sicily) and Dionysius of Halicarnassus. Among his Latin authorities on rhetoric Cornificius (usually identified with the Auctor ad Herennium), Cicero and Celsus were notable; while grammatical material was borrowed from Verrius Flaccus, Remmius Palaemon, and the elder Pliny. Quintilian possessed besides, as his quotations, allusions and criticisms show, an indispensable acquaintance with the best poetry and oratory composed in Latin.[1206]

Perhaps more than his learning, already glanced at, it is Quintilian’s prevailing sanity that impresses us. His common sense is apparent in his refusal to lose himself, despite an intricate subject, amidst a maze of rules, definitions or subdivisions; in his consequently drastic reduction of the technicalities infesting the ordinary artes or handbooks; in his repeated reminders that actual oratory gave birth to the rules, not the rules to oratory, and therefore that mere adherence to rules will never make a great speaker; in his admonition that rules cannot fit all occasions, but that circumstances alter cases; in the instructive citations of his own practical experience; in his recognition that weighty responsibility in a law-court is very different from the fictitious cases of the schools, with the corollary that practice without learning is better than learning without practice;[1207] and in the broadminded pronouncements that one’s chief model should not be one’s sole model,[1208] and that the moderns are not entirely to be ignored.[1209] With a similar eye for the practical, believer though he was in ideals, he condemns the foolishness of aiming at an unattainable perfection, and tells an illustrative anecdote. Julius Secundus, when a young student, was once found by his uncle in despair over the exordium of a speech on which he could not make a satisfactory start in spite of three days’ work: his uncle, an experienced speaker, rallied him smilingly into a sensible view by the pertinent question: “You don’t want, do you, to speak better than you can?”[1210] Quintilian would not have progress in a great subject hindered by fantastic hypercriticism: dicendum pro facultate.

So much common sense and such preoccupation with the making of an orator may forbid us to expect anything startling in his criticisms. Practical in retrospect and outlook, he could not fail to value literature mainly by standards of utility. He does not turn his eye upon sheer beauty of words as the author of the Περὶ ὕψους does;[1211] nor has he any flair for romance that might have made him appreciative of the tale of Cupid and Psyche or the Peruigilium Veneris, had they appeared in his day. It is not without significance that the grim wrestlings in Lucretius’s soul or in Catullus’s heart appear never to have affected him. The frenzy of despair and the fires of love are not such stuff as sound oratory is made of; and in any case it may be that he shares Horace’s antagonism to Catullus and Propertius, who had the temerity to exalt love into an absorbing passion and who could never have taken the Augustan official view of marriage as a civic duty. But Quintilian has admirable qualities which find parallels in our own Age of Reason during the eighteenth century. In contrast to the manifold affectations of his day, he shows a noticeable severity of taste. He seeks on all occasions to discern clearly and think directly, because he has a zest for truth; he uses learning without flaunting it, while his maturity of judgement is saved from becoming oppressive by grace of expression and occasional gleams of humour. The kindliness of his heart, his sympathy with learners, and his steady resolve to help education forward are winning traits that make the Institutio something far higher than a manual of rhetoric.

It had been his ambition to produce an up-to-date handbook on an orator’s training that might be deemed equally classic with the rhetorical works of Cicero. To this object he devoted the fruits of his reading, teaching, and thinking, so that on the technique of the past conjoined with his personal experience he was enabled to rear with admirable discernment a coherent system from which the aspirant after oratorical triumphs might realize the extent and pertinacity of effort involved. Within the field of rhetoric, no ancient writer has rivalled him in varied fullness of achievement. He not merely gave us an excellent treatment of grammar in its literary aspects, of rhetorical technicalities, of idiomatic and euphonious prose, of the contrasted virtues and styles perennial in speaking and the avenues towards success; he not merely left us an incidental sketch of select Greek and Latin authors; but even outside the realm of composition and criticism he proved himself to be one of the great educators.[1212] Though there may be no inkling of modern psychological paedagogy or of recently devised intelligence-tests, yet many of the eternal principles of a sound education are to be found in him stated for all time with convincing authority. The fact that many of his pronouncements retain their applicability amidst modern problems of teaching is, like the constant citation of his critical dicta, among the proofs of his permanent value.[1213]

Quintilian’s personal preferences in style can be gauged from the two cautions prescribed for young students, the one against an uncouth archaism, the other against the allurements of modern affectation (ne recentis huius lasciuiae flosculis capti uoluptate praua deleniantur).[1214] Admirer though he was of the Latinity of the Golden Age, and, in particular, a confessed follower of Cicero, abjuring all such artificial glitter as he associated with Seneca’s compositions, he was yet sufficiently a product of his own age to betray in his prose the new literary tendencies.[1215] That was inevitable. The most potent will could not avail to reimpose on writers a Ciceronian Latin unchanged after a lapse of nearly a century and a half. Quintilian, then, while he soberly avoids meretricious tinsel, is himself a proof of the alteration in the language since the close of the republic. The examination of single words, idioms, sentence-structure, and of literary ornament half-shyly used, must definitely place him in the Silver Age. There are words like amaritudo, consummatus, formator, profectus, professor which he shares with several post-Augustan prose-writers; some like insenesco and secessus that have come from Augustan poets into subsequent prose; others of which we do not know in Latin before him, like adnotatio, circulatorius, destructio.[1216] He has his own dash of the poetic tinge that now coloured prose—simple verbs for compounds (finire for definire, solari for consolari), abstracts for concretes, and adjectives employed as substantives.[1217] Signs of Silver Latin are noticeable in the sense he gives to adverbs like alioqui and olim, or to prepositions like circa and citra. Equally symptomatic is the fondness for augmentatives in prae-, like praedurus, praedulcis, praetenuis, and the absence of the intensive per- compounds familiar in Cicero.[1218] So, too, with syntax, in such constructions of the infinitive as opponere uerear or legi dignus. The change is, however, more than one in vocabulary and syntax. The usual ring of the sentence is different from the Ciceronian.[1219] The old amplitude of period is rarely present: it is replaced by a frequent looseness of structure whereby causal and adjectival clauses are tacked on to the sentence in a semi-detached fashion which operates against the harmony and euphony of the whole. Consequently, in spite of express preference for the ancient style of oratory,[1220] there is no longer the same fullness or symmetry in Quintilian’s modified Ciceronianism. It was Filelfo, in the fifteenth century, who suggested that one might detect in Quintilian a smack of Spain (sapit Hispanitatem) and departure from good Latin (barbariem quandam); but it is as hard to isolate any characteristic Spanish colour or atmosphere or humour in him as it is to recognize the Patavinity of Livy. His style is, at least, free from that smart artificiality which offended him in the oratory of his day; for he stigmatizes it as a great contemporary fault to court praise by studied effects under which the artifice lay transparent. “People consider that the art is lost, unless it is obvious; whereas it ceases to be art, if it is obvious.”[1221] This is in substance a return to the Horatian maxim of literary sobriety, ars est celare artem. A pervading restraint recommends him to the confidence of readers, and has contributed to form a prose which, without Aristotelian profundity or Ciceronian brilliance, is worthily adapted to the ripeness of experience that everywhere seems to speak through it. So it comes that after Seneca’s clever restlessness one has a sense of calm in Quintilian.

* * * * *

What were the vicissitudes of Quintilian’s reputation? Martial’s apostrophe, already cited, was a proclamation of his educational supremacy, as, in a left-handed way, was the fathering of spurious Declamations upon him. The Dialogus of Tacitus owed its inception probably to Quintilian’s inquiry into decadence in oratory. Published to meet an express demand, his Institutio must have enjoyed for a time a vogue which is reflected in the attitude of Juvenal and Suetonius. From Suetonius descended the information entered in Jerome’s Chronicle of the fourth century: besides, Jerome’s letters imply acquaintance with Quintilian’s writings. But the Frontonian archaizers of the second century had checked the pro-Ciceronian authority of Quintilian, and in fact we have for 300 years no evidence proving direct knowledge of his work.[1222] In the fourth century Quintilian appears to be known, except to Jerome and possibly Lactantius, solely through the Declamations. After Jerome, in spite of the fact that Cassiodorus and Isidorus recognize his rhetorical eminence, there are great intervals in time during which no mention of Quintilian can be traced. One of these long silences was broken in the ninth century when Servatus Lupus wrote to the Abbot of York asking for a copy of the twelve books of the Institutio—a request which he also preferred to the Pope with the explanation that he possessed only incomplete copies of Quintilian and of the De Oratore.[1223] Silence falls again for a couple of centuries until, in the twelfth, the testimony of John of Salisbury proves that some of Quintilian’s methods were in use at the school of Chartres; nor is that the solitary evidence for monastic acquaintance with his work at this period.[1224] Next century, the encyclopaedist Vincent of Beauvais knew his text at first hand; and then Petrarch’s enthusiastic handling of a manuscript of the Institutio, “discerptus et lacer” though it was,[1225] brings us to the verge of the Renaissance.

A strong reinforcement in the posthumous influence of Quintilian came with the rediscovery of a complete text by Poggio at St. Gall in 1416. Five years earlier, in 1411, Guarino had translated into Latin the treatise of disputed authenticity Περὶ παίδων ἀγωγῆς which is included among Plutarch’s writings and which is affected by a great deal of Quintilian’s educational theory.[1226] The two events united to confirm the hold of Quintilian over humanism at the Revival of Learning.[1227] In the general purpose of the humanist educator—the production not of a pedantic recluse but of an all-round man and fully equipped citizen—there was great similarity to the aims of the Institutio. For the attainment of Quintilian’s ideal no less than for that of the Renaissance, it was requisite to develop natural gifts by training, to form character by the lessons of standard literature, and to ensure an attractive dignity of bearing in social relations. The modern might be expected to find more ways of employing leisure nobly than a Roman gentleman of the Empire, to have more freedom of personal grace, and to show, if less oratorical cleverness, then perhaps more skill in conversation—but the fundamental basis for both systems was the same, and this explains why Quintilian was so warmly taken to the hearts of the humanists. His influence was enormous on educators like Vittorino da Feltre, Aeneas Sylvius Piccolomini (Pius II), Guarino, Agricola, Bebel, Vives and Melanchthon. Nowhere did it work more clearly than on Erasmus himself. In England Quintilian’s authority can be traced decidedly as far back as Elyot’s Governour of 1531. Ascham was much less impressed, whereas extensive borrowings from Quintilian went to the making of Ben Jonson’s Discoveries. Later, among great figures in our literature, Pope stands out as the one who had most understanding of “grave Quintilian’s copious works,” where “the justest rules and clearest methods” are “all ranged in order and disposed with grace.”[1228] Apart from inevitable references in the comparatively modern treatises on rhetoric by Blair, Campbell and Whately, it must be recognized that Quintilian has scarcely attracted in Britain his due share of attention—but then we are not a rhetorical nation.

DECLAMATIONS AND ORATORS

Two sets of Declamationes[1229] have come down under Quintilian’s name in separate MSS, the one consisting of nineteen fairly elaborate productions, the other of 145 shorter and sketchy ones from a collection originally numbering 388; for time has mercifully spared us the first 243. The ascription to Quintilian does not now convince many scholars of the authenticity of either collection. There has not, however, always been equal distrust. The Oxford editors of the longer declamations in the seventeenth century published them as specimens of his method, anticipating in the preface gratitude for omitting “the sorry remains and unsightly ruins” (miseras reliquias et informia rudera) of the 388 shorter ones. On the other hand, these same remnants were claimed for Quintilian by Aerodius in the sixteenth century and by Ritter in recent times.

In neither collection is the Latin notably irregular. There are in the nineteen longer declamations no very glaring deviations from classical diction to make belief in Quintilian’s authorship prima facie absurd on bare linguistic grounds. Yet features in the form of argument and the over-frequent recourse to sententiae of doubtful relevance point to a later date for some of them at least. Ritter thinks four authors[1230] are represented; and Reitzenstein thinks even more, in which he is supported by Golz after an examination of the clausulae.[1231] Few may accept in detail the groups arrived at by tests partly subjective and partly numerical; but it is likely enough that some are nearer in time to Quintilian than others and may actually represent themes used in his school. A plausible guess is that we have here a collection made and perhaps amplified by a contemporary of Gellius or Apuleius.[1232]

As early as the third century A.D., there was current a collection of declamations referred to Quintilian but recognized as containing spurious specimens.[1233] Jerome and Servius in the fourth century, and later Isidorus, quote from the longer declamations; Jerome, indeed, like Lactantius, quotes other declamations now lost. The belief of antiquity, therefore, that some of the declamations came down from Quintilian was unquestioning. But here, where there is so much triviality, so much of what he himself condemned in oratory, our hardest task is to believe either collection worthy of the great teacher. Ritter, however, has championed the authenticity of the shorter pieces, claiming that as legal speeches by Quintilian were brought out without his permission, so it is possible that these scholastic speeches were issued in an unauthorized way. Of two works in the province of rhetoric mentioned by Quintilian as having been published by enthusiastic pupils from notes, Ritter identifies the second with the shorter declamations; but, as this second work is stated to have been taken down in a comparatively few days, it is not easy to think it the same as the long series of what was once 388 school-themes, or to think it could be appropriately mentioned as an ars rhetorica.[1234]

It remains to glance at the collections themselves. The “learned and ingenious hand” who made the English version of the nineteen specimens in 1686 regarded them as an “exercitation or praxis upon Quintilian’s XII Books,” naïvely pronouncing them to be “the cream and product of the most promising wits (in the schools) culled out and polished by the second hand of the master.” Some turn upon immorality or crime: some have a public bearing: more often, with features akin to the Greek comedy of manners or a modern novel, their interest is social or domestic. A few could be served up as romances like The Philtre of Loathing (XIV, XV), or as spiritualistic cases for investigation by the Psychical Research Society, like The Spell-bound Tomb (X), in which a mother, hitherto comforted by visions of her dead son, is aggrieved because a magician, at her husband’s instigation, has by enchantment cut off communication with the ghost. A detective story might be made out of The Wall with Handprints of Blood (I); and then we have the usual quota of pirates. A half-romantic theme like a wizard’s prophecy may be entangled with two imaginary laws which create a dilemma for debate. Thus, the fourth case concerns a brave young soldier whose horoscope, read by an astrologer long ago, had foretold that he would win distinction in battle but would one day kill his father. Now, there are supposed to be in this state two laws; (i) “A warrior who has served his country nobly may choose his reward;” (ii) “A citizen who meditates suicide must render satisfactory reasons for his resolve in open senate, under the penalty (so dreadful to the ancients) of having his body refused burial.” Here is the crux. The wizard’s prophecy about his valour has come true: he cannot face the likelihood of committing parricide which has by the power of suggestion become an obsession. The only way out, therefore, is to kill himself; but to secure burial he must gain the senate’s approval. This, then, is the reward which he will ask—leave to put himself to death:

“I, who am willing to die that I may not commit parricide, do not see but I must commit it, if I continue to live.... As for my father, who would keep me alive against my will, I do not wonder at him, because he is still overjoyed at the fresh acquist of my martial glory (adhuc recenti gloriae nostrae gaudio stupet).... He cannot see the parricide through the champion.”

The situation is not one which could ever trouble the student in actual life, but, like many other exercises, it served to evoke ingenuity in pleading. We seem to see literature in the making, when we chance upon a miniature study in the workings of fate that might form the basis of a Greek tragedy:

“My father was so far from being deterred by the prediction of his own danger that he himself, I say, (alack for the melancholy force of fate—proh tristis necessitas!), girt on my arms and equipped me for battle with his own hands, as if assured of the astrologer’s veracity (tanquam mathematico iam credidisset).... And now he will not have me die, though there is nothing left for me to do but to murder him. O Death, who art commendable for the valiant, desirable for the wretched, and not to be rejected even by the happy! How much have I courted thee in war! (quanum te quaesiuimus in bello!)”

He relates how he bore a charmed life amidst the deadliest dangers: as no foe could slay him, he now must beg permission to kill himself:

“Titles, statues, dignities—reserve them for those who must live: guarantee me but my father’s safety, my own innocence, and the respect of history (temporum pudorem).... I trust the House will not consider that my father’s appearing against me (contradictione) debars me of my reward.”

The pleader contends that in any case it is better to die young in the midst of one’s fame than to endure the decrepitude of old age; but, in his special case, he is destined by his horoscope to die as a felon, if the fortune-teller spoke truth. Then comes a fresh turn. His valiancy in battle after all could only have been downright frenzy:

“I was not myself when I fought so gallantly; and I shall commit parricide too when I am not myself.... God forbid that I should tarry till the issue decide the conflict betwixt the wizard’s response and myself. I had rather defeat the astrologer than find fault with his predictions (mathematicum uincere malo quam reprehendere).”

This, then, is the paradoxical impasse: he can baulk his destiny only by death. If he is allowed to die now, his father, who admittedly loves him, will be able to shower affection upon his body, and (in the peroration)

“when you have had enough of farewell embraces, then and not till then is it right to lift up your hands towards heaven and cry out, ‘Wizard, thou art a liar!’ (mathematice, mentitus es).”

It is wonderful with what variety of argument or reflection upon life and death, astrology and the power of prediction, such a theme can be elaborated. Similar dexterity, worthy of more solid cases, pervades most of the orations. It scarcely matters whether we have a lawsuit to compensate a poor man’s loss of bees through poison sprinkled on his rich neighbour’s flowers, or a strange malady of sleepy sickness attacking twins, of whom the doctor undertakes to cure one if he is allowed to put the other to death and hold a post-mortem!

* * * * *

The shorter declamations (and some are fortunately quite short) are more profitably represented in specimens than in their wearisome total. The problems are such as arise out of cases of outrage, divorce, adultery, murder of or by outlaws, tyrannicide, military desertion, shipwreck, prodigality of sons, harshness of fathers, or (like later Italian novelle) marriage between a son and a daughter of hostile families. Handling the type of theme already worn threadbare in Augustan days, they cannot be considered uniformly entertaining. Yet there are exceptions, and all is not monotony. One may even be grateful for absurd instances with outlines that might serve for wildly impossible tales; and, dipping further into the collection, one cannot deny that it has some variety. We may light upon the Gilbertian situation of a Cynic youth with a professed contempt for the good things of life objecting to disinheritance by his father; or a sober question of legacies to relatives or freedmen; or a semi-economic discussion on a proposed equalization of property, with such pertinent queries as whether it is to be for once and all, or whether the equalizing process is to be carried out as often as some one, for any reason whatever, is found to have less than his fellows. Favourite themes are dilemmas due to conflict between two laws: e.g. If a man exiled for treason has come so gallantly to the aid of his country in wartime that she gratefully recalls him, can he have his original conviction reviewed in spite of a law that the same case must not be heard twice? Or, again, if an exile has illegally come home before his time has expired, is he entitled to plead a law permitting an injured husband to inflict on his wife and her paramour the fate that befell Paolo and Francesca? A common motif is that of an outraged woman. There is a refinement of this theme in the case where the unfortunate lady seems at various crises to jump out of the frying-pan into the fire. Against her father’s wish, she had exercised her option to marry the violator rather than have him put to death. For this compassion her father disowns her. When her father afterwards fell into poverty, filial affection impelled her to relieve his straits in spite of her husband’s objection; and for this he divorces her! Many cases, however, are of a stereotyped character, with little to differentiate them from the elder Seneca’s examples, except perhaps greater silliness.[1235] In the case of the imported slave dressed by a dealer as a free citizen to cheat the Customs, one recognizes a parallel to that given by Suetonius as an illustration of the controuersia.[1236]

It is usual to find imaginary points of law freely and subtly raised, effective lines of argument being sketched in the sermo, and the rhetorical handling in the declamatio. Sometimes we get more than one sermo and declamatio: sometimes a section is devoted to the law of the case before it is examined in equity: sometimes the sermo is absent, leaving the declamatio, as in the dispute among three sons, an orator, a physician, and a philosopher, claiming the property of their deceased father, whose will constituted as his heir the son who should be proved to have best served the state. The general method may be exemplified in The Digging up of the Parricide’s Bones.[1237] Two laws are here assumed that may conflict: (i) “Let a parricide’s body be cast out unburied”; (ii) “Let the violation of a grave be actionable.” The statement of the case is in brief as follows: a father on his death-bed, declaring that his two sons have poisoned him, enjoins on his daughter the duty of vengeance. She accuses them both. Before the trial one commits suicide and is buried in the family tomb. The other, when tried, is found guilty, put to death, and his body left to rot. The daughter, presuming the guilt of the suicide, has his corpse exhumed and cast forth. She is charged with illegal violation of a grave. In the sermo, among questions suggested for discussion are these: is it illegal to disinter a buried person in any circumstances? More particularly, is it legal for one who could have prevented the burial in the first instance? Does the law, in forbidding burial of a parricide, forbid burial only of persons duly convicted? From the declamatio a few sentences may indicate the rhetorical line of defence:

“So then (had he not been exhumed) the dead parricide would have been buried and laid in lasting rest beside his father (his victim)!... Is such treatment to be conceded to one whom the law would cut off from the light of heaven when alive and from the earth when dead?... Must not a dutiful daughter listen to the troubled ghost of her father, unable to bear contact with a guilty son?”

Tediously unreal though the declamations are, they have a genuine importance in the history of ancient education and eloquence. They link the exercises of the Golden Age, as recorded by the elder Seneca, with those of several succeeding centuries. Deserving to die of their own dullness, they yet had surprising vitality, so that when we turn to the Greek declamations of the sophist Libanius, whose works help to make the century of Gregory Nazianzenus, Basil the Great and Julian the Apostate live again for us, we find the time-honoured themes still under treatment in the Eastern empire. The gibe of Gibbon that Libanius lived too much in the times of the Trojan War and in Athenian history might lead one to overlook other themes of his, of equal artificiality but of more social interest, in which preternaturally embittered fathers, unscrupulous stepmothers and disinherited sons play much the same part as they do in the Latin exercises that passed under Quintilian’s name.[1238]

Quintilian himself passed on what he found valuable in the rhetorical lore of writers like Rutilius Lupus and Celsus. He mentions together[1239] the senior rhetorical authors of his own day, Verginius Flavus, Pliny (the elder), and Tutilius, thus looking back in the case of the first-named to the Neronian age; for Verginius, as has been noted, taught Persius. Tutilius is named by Martial,[1240] when he counsels a parent to avoid for his boy’s instructors all grammarians and rhetors, and so “leave Tutilius alone in his glory.” It is unfortunate for the completeness of our record that Quintilian expressly omits mention of authors alive when he wrote the Institutio.[1241] Princeps was a rhetorician whom Suetonius could remember as giving on alternate days exhibitions of declamation and disputation. Julius Tiro is mentioned just after Quintilian himself in Suetonius’s list of rhetoricians, and Julius Gabinianus, who figures in the same list, won a great name as a teacher in Gaul during the Flavian period.[1242] M. Aquilius Regulus, the younger Pliny’s bugbear, wrote books including a biographical lament on his dead son, but unscrupulously applied his oratorical gifts in delation, as did the hated Baebius Massa, Mettius Carus and Palfurius Sura. At the bar there were many able speakers less famous than Tacitus and Pliny themselves, such as Herennius Senecio, who was with Pliny in the impeachment of Baebius Massa; Vitorius Marcellus to whom Quintilian dedicated his Institutio; the African Septimius Severus, grandfather to the emperor of that name, and known to Statius and Martial; Satrius Rufus whom Pliny characterizes as content with contemporary style without seeking to rival Cicero (which Pliny himself tried to do); Valerius Licinianus, a native of Bilbilis, admired as a sort of Cicero by his fellow-Spaniard Martial, exiled under Domitian, but allowed by Nerva to settle as a professor of oratory in Sicily; and one of Martial’s patrons, the Spaniard Licinius Sura, who later composed speeches for Trajan.

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III. FRONTINUS AND TECHNICAL WRITERS

Career of Frontinus—A general’s prose anthology of Stratagems—Who wrote the fourth book?—Frontinus’s treatment of sources—The water-commissioner’s account of The Aqueducts—His scheme—Belief in honest work—Glimpses of his character—Latinity.

Professional writers of the Flavian age.

FRONTINUS

The works of Sextus Julius Frontinus[1243] originated largely in posts which he held during his public career. No one could have shown more of that thorough devotion to the details of official duty with which many of the best-born Romans ensured the greatness of the Empire. Frontinus was of good family, and his friend Martial alludes to a poetic vein discoverable in him during leisure hours at the coast.[1244] Since, however, his books are practical rather than literary, it looks as if the energetic general and water-commissioner found scant time for any play of fancy. On New Year’s Day A.D. 70 we meet him[1245] at a sitting of the senate, which he had summoned as city praetor, prepared presently to hand over his office to the young prince Domitian. His birth-date, then, may be guessed as about 40. In Britain his name is of historic interest; for as governor (75-78) he proved a worthy successor to the vigorous Cerealis, whose successes against the Brigantes of the North he equalled by victories over the Silures in the difficult territories of South Wales.[1246] It is likely that the Roman road from Bath and beyond the Bristol Channel westwards by Caerwent and Caerleon was engineered under his orders, even if it was not yet called the Via Julia. He was succeeded by Agricola in 78; but presumably saw further military service with Domitian in Germany against the Chatti in 83, since he makes specific allusions to the emperor’s tactics.[1247] Some time afterwards, we know from internal evidence,[1248] he was at work on a collection of stratagems in continuation of an earlier tactical manual, and at its outset he claims to be the solitary author to treat military science systematically.[1249] It was in 97 that Nerva, aware of much slackness and corruption in the administration of the water-supply for Rome, showed confidence in the ability and integrity of Frontinus by appointing him superintendent of the aqueducts (curator aquarum).

To the new commissioner’s determination never to rely upon subordinates for advice but to learn for himself everything of moment affecting his task[1250] we owe his immediate start upon the historical, topographical and statistical record which we possess in the De Aquis. Consul for a third time in the year 100, he held the position of augur until 103, the date of a letter by the younger Pliny[1251] acknowledging a correspondent’s congratulations on his own nomination by the emperor to the college of augurs in succession to Frontinus. We may therefore infer that he died in that year.

If all his writings had survived, they would have added still more to the technical and professional effect of those we have. He composed a work on land-surveying and land-laws, but of this gromatic treatise only excerpts have come down.[1252] His theoretical treatise on military science (De re militari) is lost; but in the extant Strategematon Libri Tres we have a sequel for the use of officers,[1253] illustrating principles of war by stratagems chosen from Greek and Roman history. They are grouped as those for use (Book I) before battle, (Book II) during battle and after; (Book III) at sieges; and are again subdivided into sections headed “on concealing one’s plans,” “on finding out the enemy’s plans,” “on escaping from difficult positions,” and so on.

A fourth book, containing anecdotes of another sort, has come down with The Stratagems and constitutes a problem. The preface acknowledges that the recorded instances illustrate military management rather than stratagems (exempla potius strategicon quam strategemata). They are treated in categories such as “discipline,” “restraint,” “justice,” “determination,” so that the ethical aspect forms a contrast to the three preceding books. The book has not lacked champions of its authenticity even in recent times.[1254] Whereas, however, the three books on stratagems bear marks of common authorship with the De Aquis,[1255] there are considerations that tend to isolate the fourth book. These include differences in thought between it and the undoubtedly genuine parts of the prefaces, and, throughout, differences in build of sentence, in turn of expression and use of words.[1256] Equally tell-tale are traces of a change of tone in the latest preface; besides there is no clear explanation of the departure from the author’s express resolve to write three books.

Yet the Latinity of Book IV does not appear to be demonstrably so much more post-Augustan than that in Books I-III that critics need put it as late as the fourth or the fifth century.[1257] Expressions quoted against it like de uariis consiliis are not decisive. Gundermann[1258] passed a more discriminating judgement upon its Latin by referring it to a date close to Frontinus’s own, early in the second century. Schanz’s hypothesis claims that the author was contemporary with Frontinus, and that he recorded an actual experience of his own in the surrender of the Lingones in A.D. 70 to himself.[1259] It is difficult to believe in this unknown officer, who for this one occasion betrays his personal experience and in several other places relies upon Frontinus’s instances. The hypothesis in any case has to assume that a third person combined this book with the genuine three, and, to effect a plausible deception, not only wrote a fictitious preface for the later book, but also foisted a passage, ostensibly by Frontinus, into the original introduction to the earlier work.[1260] But it is not an unnatural supposition that the fourth book was written by an imitator impressed with Frontinus’s example and responsive to Roman interest in military literature, and that he paid his model the compliment of incorporating material from him.[1261] If this author pretended to write as Frontinus, the episode of the surrender of the Lingones may have been an insertion by him to lend verisimilitude to his forgery; if not, it was due to a subsequent interpolator, who, on all the theories, seems a necessary postulate to account for certain intrusions and repetitions in the text. The borrowings are not all made by the author of Book IV, for some of his work is found interpolated in the earlier collection.[1262] And what sort of interpolator or editor must we picture when we find instances repeated even within the space of the opening book?[1263]

Any collection of anecdotes pure and simple, even in the lightest vein, is apt to pall: so one tires of the concentrated essence of stratagem in campaign or siege administered in tabloid doses without comment. While Macaulay can thrill in relating “how well Horatius kept the bridge,” Frontinus’s bald account is Livy with all the lactea ubertas squeezed out.[1264] Here and there, however, points of interest arise. Some of his examples of Machiavellian diplomacy or astute ruses de guerre prove that everything may be held fair in war. When we read about a screen of prisoners (captiuos lateri euntium praetexuit, I. iv, 1: cf. 2), or about poisoning an enemy’s water-supply (aquam hellebore corruptam, III. vii, 6), we recognize that unchivalrous devilry in military operations is not a peculiarity of any one period; while an instance of premeditated disregard of a covenant (III. iv. 6) anticipates the doctrine that treaty obligations must yield to military necessity. If such examples are abreast of modern ruthlessness, the author himself appears hopelessly antiquated in his naïve confession that he sees no prospect of improving engines of war.[1265]

Frontinus took the majority of his examples from Greek and Roman history before the Empire. Occasionally we find something later, like an allusion to the Variana clades of A.D. 9, or to Corbulo’s fighting in Armenia during Nero’s reign, or to Domitian’s campaigns; but his main sources are Caesar, Sallust and Livy. No stress need be laid on the two passages where Livy is cited by name (II. v. 31 and 34); for both are possibly interpolations. On the whole, Frontinus is free in his rehandling of originals, as may be seen if one compares passages in Livy with his adaptations.[1266] If, further, one compares passages in Livy with the adaptations by both Valerius Maximus and Frontinus,[1267] one will find that the latter does not show the almost slavish dependence upon Valerius which characterizes the author of Book IV.[1268] Sometimes indeed Frontinus is free to the extent of carelessness and inaccuracy. He is capable of confusing occasions and individuals. Thus he misrepresents Livy’s Diodorus as Diodotus (III. xvi. 5); turns a device used by Cincinnatus against the Volscians into one by Capitolinus against the Falisci (II. viii. 3); alters to Cimbrians Livy’s Celtiberians (II. v. 8), having in the preceding section (II. v. 7) called Viriathus “dux Celtiberorum,” though he is “dux Lusitanorum” elsewhere (II. xiii. 4). The trick ascribed to Manlius as a means of encouraging his men against the Etruscans (II. vii. 11) appears, on comparison with Livy and Dionysius, to involve a mistake between two colleagues. In such cases Frontinus’s memory may have played him false amidst the multitude of names with which he had to deal.

The Strategemata belongs to Domitian’s reign. The more famous treatise De Aquis Vrbis Romae, in two books, was begun under Nerva, but not finished until Trajan had succeeded him.[1269] Only those without historical sense will dismiss as totally unreadable his description of aqueducts once vital in their utility and still in ruin imposingly picturesque. Undertaken in the conscientious spirit of mastering his business and instructing successors,[1270] the author’s labour was lightened by belief in the value of his duties; for, in his eyes, the maintenance of the aqueducts gave “a signal testimony to the greatness of the Roman Empire” (cum magnitudinis Romani imperii uel praecipuum sit indicium, 119). He had to contemplate a state of things very different from the old times when for 441 years Rome had been content with water from the Tiber, wells, or springs. Springs, he allows, may have healing virtues, and are still the objects of veneration (fontium memoria cum sanctitate adhuc exstat et colitur, 4); but his concern is now a practical one, directed upon nine or ten majestic conduits bringing water for miles over stone arches into the city.

His scheme embraced an account of the builders of the aqueducts, dates of construction, direction, length of channels, elevations, measurements of pipe-capacity and of volume at intake and delivery, as well as a list of curators up to his own day. Statistical details of wastage and of the amounts of water distributed by the several aqueducts in the several wards are certain—and the author knows it—to be complicated as well as dull (non ieiunam tantum sed etiam perplexam, 77); but he prescribes a cure in judicious skipping (licebit transire leuiora). We soon weary of the quinaria, the official unit of measurement, which Di Fenizio has recently calculated to have equalled 0.48 litre per second or 41.5 cubic metres per 24 hours. Yet even a cursory perusal yields instructive items. We read about the limpid drinking water that came from the Marcia; about unnecessary blending with turbid waters which spoiled the best; about fraudulent tapping of the supply; about the system of repairs; and topographical facts which illuminate features of the landscape near Rome to-day. A good deal is not literature but archaeology or engineering. All the same, it is a human document presenting an unvarnished picture of scrupulous and observant fidelity in the control of an essential public service, where there had been slackness and dishonesty. Through its unpretentious style shines a personality with a true conception of civic virtue, determined to aid Nerva and Trajan in undoing the abuses of the previous reign. For a man of culture it must have entailed some self-sacrifice to settle down upon the dry minutiae of the water-supply. Still, he was rewarded by a satisfaction in work well done which justified his proud reflection that his reforms had, under imperial auspices, made Rome a salubrious city:

The Queen and Mistress of the globe realizes from day to day the care bestowed by our devoted emperor Nerva, her ruler; still more will the health of this same eternal city realize it in the increase of reservoirs, waterworks, fountains and tanks. No less benefit is distributed among individual consumers owing to the increase in the emperor’s private grants: those also who nervously used to draw an illegal water-supply are now relieved from anxiety and enjoy it by imperial bounty. Not even waste-water is lost: the look of the city is clean and improved: what we breathe is purer: and, as regards the unwholesome atmosphere, the causes which gave to the air of Rome its bad name have been removed.[1271]

The old-fashioned practical Roman of limited outlook speaks through the disdainful self-complacency of his exclamation:

With such a number of indispensable structures for all these waters you are welcome to compare the idle Pyramids or all the futile, though renowned, works by Greeks.[1272]

This, however, is a note of national hauteur. As an individual he was the reverse of boastful, and his modesty is illustrated in Pliny’s story about his forbidding any monument to be erected to himself, because, as he pithily put it, “Our memory will last if deserved by our life” (memoria nostra durabit si uita meruimus).[1273]

The composition of the De Aquis involved, besides personal observation and inquiries, research among records and business documents. Part of its material is based on reports from surveyors and engineers. Senatorial decrees affecting the aqueducts are recited.[1274] Among Roman writers quoted are Fenestella, Ateius Capito and Caelius Rufus.[1275] It was characteristic of the man that his style should be straightforward in its freedom from artifice. He liked parade in composition as little as he did in the performance of duty. Dispensing with the attendants decreed to a water-commissioner on official business outside Rome, he declares: “for myself, when on my rounds inspecting the conduits, my own honesty and the authority given by his Majesty will serve for lictors” (101). So, too, he wisely refrained from pomp or epigram on such a subject as the water-supply. Very occasionally there is a sly hit, like that at the honesty required from masons on the wall “in accord with a law more honoured in the breach than in the observance” (secundum legem notam omnibus sed a paucis obseruatam, 123). But his belief, as we have learned from Pliny, that a man’s surest memorial is a worthy life makes a complete apologia for the absence of literary refinements.

His Latinity has been just glanced at in connexion with the problem of a pseudo-Frontinus. The “Silver” mark is unmistakeable in such usages as citra meaning “without,” circa meaning “about” or “over,” quamquam with subjunctive or participle, and future participles with a notion of purpose.[1276] A reader can tell his whereabouts in the history of the language, when three lines in the preface to Book III give him hucusque, praelocutione and attentione (used absolutely, as in Quintilian). Many such typically post-Augustan words as sequelae (II. iv. 8) occur, or at least words, as we should expect remembering the main source of the Strategemata, that are Livian but otherwise mainly post-Augustan, like exasperatus (II. i. 11), praeualere (II. i. 8) and subinde (I. iii. 10, iv. 13; II. iii. 23, ix. 1; III. ix. 7). There are poetic epithets like inrequietum (II. ix. 1) which prose took over from Ovid, and there are phrases like bello adfusus (I. i. 8) and profunda siluarum (I. iii. 10) that have a Tacitean ring. Annuntiare (= nuntiare, I. ix. 2) is one of the words common to Frontinus with the elder Pliny and Apuleius which passed through the sermo cotidianus and ecclesiastical Latin into the Italian annunziare and the French annoncer.

We have had occasion to point out resemblances between the Strategemata and the De Aquis in their Latin. The latter is nowhere more obviously post-Augustan, or non-Ciceronian, than in its employment of the superlative piissimus (De Aq. 88). Used by Mark Antony and condemned by Cicero as impossible,[1277] it was accepted by Curtius, Seneca, Tacitus and Florus. Resemblances between Frontinus’s Latin and that of Book IV are explained away by Wölfflin as conscious imitation on the part of the spurious author. It is at least arguable that, since words of his like adiutorium, foret as a variant for esset, notabilis and subinde[1278] belonged to the manner of the period, there was no need to steal them. Representative words in Book IV bear the same general post-Augustan stamp, usually with a Livian association, like praecessisse (IV. ii. 1, “be before others” in getting a bridge built), praeoptare (IV. ii. 2, v. 22, “prefer”), acclinauerat (IV. v. 5, “leaned against”), ampliaretur (IV. iii. 12, “be increased,” an extension from the legal sense of adjournment). As a significant parallel to inrequietum in the unchallenged part of Frontinus, we have an Ovidian word in obmurmurare (IV. vi. 2). The whole linguistic evidence runs counter to any violent separation of the books in time of composition.

TECHNICAL WRITERS

In the professional writing of the Flavian age, law and grammar may be included. Under Vespasian, the Sabinian school of jurists was represented by Caelius Sabinus, and the Proculian by Pegasus. Other legal writers were Urseius Ferox, Plautius, and Juventius Celsus the elder. The younger Juventius belongs, with Neratius Priscus, to later Flavian days and still more to Trajan’s reign. One of the juridical writers of Domitian’s time was Aufidius Chius, mentioned by Martial. Among refined literary critics of the day was Apollinaris, also in Martial, whose Claranus, however, perhaps belonged to an earlier period. Possibly, but not certainly, we may place here Largius or Larcius Licinus, whose Ciceromastix is significant of a literary quarrel; and Aemilius Asper, the erudite grammarian, who left his mark on ancient scholarship by his commentaries upon Terence, Sallust and Virgil.

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IV. VALERIUS FLACCUS

What is known of the life of Valerius Flaccus—Romance in his theme—Predecessors—The story of the Argonautica—Apollonius of Rhodes and Valerius—How was the epic designed to end?—The Roman element—Comparative lack of vogue—Features of his language—Metre—Qualities of style.

C. Valerius Flaccus[1279] belongs, at least in part, to the time of Vespasian. If we accept “Balbus Setinus” or “Setinus Balbus,” the additions to his name in subscriptiones of the Vatican MS., then he may have been a native of Setia, but whether that was the Setia in Campania or one of two Setias in Spain it is impossible to determine. No special Spanish qualities are discoverable in him, and he was Roman enough to serve on the committee of fifteen for sacrifices.[1280] Almost at the outset of his Argonautica, in invoking the emperor, he refers to Vespasian’s service in British seas, to the recent capture of Jerusalem by Titus in A.D. 70, and to the supposed likelihood that Vespasian’s younger “offspring” (proles), Domitian, might celebrate his brother’s exploits:

O thou yet more renowned for opening The ocean, since the Caledonian wave (That erst disdained our Trojan-blooded race) Hath yielded to thy sails, O sire revered, Raise me above the herd, and cloudy earth. Show favour to a bard who sings the fame Of heroes of old days and deathless deeds. Thine offspring shall unfold (for he hath skill) Judaea’s fall, and how his brother, smirched With Salem’s dust, launched firebrands everywhere, War-maddened all along the towered walls.[1281]

Beginning his epic, therefore, soon after 70, he made slow progress; for in the third and fourth books[1282] he alludes to the eruption of Vesuvius in 79, and apparently he never completed the eighth book. Quintilian, writing in the early nineties of the century, is the only classical writer who mentions him. His words of regret over his recent death (multum in Valerio Flacco nuper amisimus, X. i. 90) suggest that Valerius died about A.D. 90.

In the Quest of the Golden Fleece Valerius had a subject which no one could make entirely dull. The tale of the earliest of ships,[1283] the Argo, of its hazards by sea and land, of the love between Jason and the outlandish princess Medea, and of the perilous winning of the dragon-guarded treasure contains the same inherent romance as that which colours adventures upon the Spanish Main, so that Heredia’s line in Les Conquérants might equally well have been written of Jason’s crew,

Ils allaient conquérir le fabuleux métal.

Here too were voyagers for whom, under the perpetual imminence of the unknown, each night brought hopes and dreams of heroic morrows. This is the stuff of which epics can be made. Valerius, luckier in choosing such a theme than Lucan and Silius were in drawing upon history, could hardly fail, notwithstanding the trammels of his episodes, to catch and convey some gleams of its pure roseate charm. The story of Statius’s Thebaid stirs in the bosom little perceptible emotion; but it is otherwise with the fortunes of the Argonauts. A primeval glamour plays round a legend which may be older than the tale of Troy: and we can be sure that it is older than the composition of one of the Homeric poems as we have it, for in the Odyssey Jason’s fabled ship is mentioned as in all men’s minds.[1284]

In a story so old, Valerius had many predecessors. He was not even the first Roman poet to handle it. Varro of Atax had based a work on the Argonautica of Apollonius of Rhodes, and a reference in Probus[1285] to Varro makes it likely that his poem was accompanied with a commentary whence Valerius might have derived material. Ancient Greek writers on the myth, Herodotus, the Attic tragedians, Apollodorus and Diodorus seem to have furnished Valerius with subject-matter, but whether directly, or indirectly through scholia on his chief source, Apollonius, it is hard to say.[1286] Later Greek writers also contributed their portion; and his geographical learning, as in the catalogue of peoples in Book VI, came more probably from Eratosthenes than from the elder Pliny. To his material sources Valerius added inventions of his own, and treated the whole in a style upon which the influence of Virgil and of Ovid are unmistakeable.

The hexameters of the eight books reach a total of 5593, and Book I is the longest (851). Greek though the theme be, the poet’s aspiration is that his “utterances may fill the cities of Latium” (l. 21). The narrative opens with the jealousy felt by Pelias, king of Thessaly, towards Jason, the son of his brother Aeson, and his crafty plan to despatch his nephew on the dangerous Quest of the Golden Fleece under the pretext of revenge on Aeetes of Colchis for the murder of Phrixus. Jason feels the lure of glory, prays for the favour of Juno, and at Minerva’s command builds, decorates and solemnly launches the Argo. Heroes flock to man her—Hercules brings the youth Hylas, and Chiron his ward Achilles. Sunset comes and

Dotted along the crescent bay are lights That show not lands as yet to mariners,[1287]

because there are no mariners! Orpheus whiles away the hours of night with a relevant ballad on the drowning of Helle by falling into the sea from the back of the golden ram, and on the escape of Phrixus, her brother. When the Dawn-goddess comes, “setting the sea a-shimmer with the morning sun,”[1288] it is to display the adventurers in readiness for their start, which takes place after Jason’s parents, Aeson and Alcimede, have given utterance to their grief at the parting. A catalogue of the crew is added in about 130 lines (352-483). Their number is fifty, including Acastus, Pelias’s son, who joins stealthily at the moment of sailing. It is one of Valerius’s many departures from Apollonius that he more subtly represents Jason as inducing his cousin to share the dangerous voyage, whereas Apollonius makes him join voluntarily. Another difference is his introduction of the catalogue at a considerably later point than in Apollonius—an improvement, because he has first roused the human interest in the heroes. To the signal of three trumpet-blasts the galley sets forth, Telamon stroking on port-side and Hercules on starboard, with Orpheus to give time to the rowers, Argus in charge of ship-repairs, and Tiphys as pilot. The sailing has not passed unnoticed in heaven. The Sun-god, sire of Aeetes, whose domain is threatened, complains to Jove, Mars supporting the complaint, while Juno and Pallas oppose it. It is the old celestial machinery conventional in epic. As in Virgil, Jove replies, unfolding destiny with a Roman note prophetic of other empires,[1289] and, again as in Virgil, the hero’s ship is menaced by a storm which Neptune calms. Meanwhile, Pelias’s impotent grief over the secret departure of his son in the Argo is vigorously described. He can strike at Jason through his parents, as he declares in Latin reminiscent of Virgil:

Here too, thou robber, thou canst suffer wounds: Here there be tears and thy beloved sire.[1290]

But the old folk resolve to forestall the cruelty of the king, and drain a cup of bull’s blood. The death of Aeson and his consort is the occasion for a picture of the under-world strongly marked by Virgilian influence. Both in ideas and language the last twenty lines of the book recall Aeneid VI: e.g. the new adaptation of the Twin Gates; the joys of light, dance and song in the abodes of bliss; and the type of life on earth that is a passport to happiness.[1291]

The feeling that the Argonauts were “the first that ever burst” into a silent sea is skilfully suggested early in Book II by the description of sundown:

The sunset hour had doubled every fear, When now they saw heaven’s face revolve, while hills And plains were wrested from their eyes, and round Lay darkness heavy. E’en the peace of things— The great world’s silences—affrighted them, And stars, and sky begemmed with streaming locks. Then, as one who in land unknown is lost, Still wandering on his journey through the night, Finds ne’er a rest for eye or ear, but all Around the blackness of the earth, and trees, That seem to meet him blacker for their shade, Deepen his dread of night—not otherwise The heroes felt alarm.[1292]

Guided by the stars, they make Lemnos; whereupon a digression relates how it came that Vulcan loved and Venus hated the island. Digression though it be, it is a well-told tale (which in turn influenced Statius) concerning the murder by the Lemnian women of their husbands returning from war, and Hypsipyle’s rescue of her royal father in an old ship. Her love for Jason is a copy in miniature of Dido’s for Aeneas. Jason, like the Trojan prince, has to be reminded of his mission; and there is grief in Lemnos when the Argonauts leave. The book contains a further incident—the rescue by Hercules and Telamon of the daughter of Laomedon from the sea-monster, and the scheming of the mean-souled Laomedon to avoid giving the rescuer the promised reward of white horses. Putting to sea again, they pass the narrows between Europe and Asia and are welcomed by King Cyzicus in his town.

Most of Book III is occupied with two incidents—the fight against Cyzicus and the capture of Hylas by a water-nymph. The former is a fatality due to a mistake pathetic in intention but in essence incredibly grotesque. The Argonauts have sailed away laden with farewell gifts from Cyzicus. Now, the goddess Cybele nurses a grudge against the royal house for the slaughter of one of her sacred lions during a hunt. It is, therefore, brought about that Tiphys, the steersman, is sunk in deep slumber and that the Argo drifts back to Cyzicus’s city, where in the dark enemies are fancied to be at hand. The battle thus begun in error lasts, we are expected to believe, through much of the night, and the Homeric slaughter wrought by the Argonauts is told with a realism considerably overdone: bones and jaws resound beneath the blows, and the land is white with scattered brains! (sparsusque cerebro albet ager, 166). The mighty boon (donum ingens) of being killed by Hercules leads one victim to the knowledge that a dreadful blunder has been made, and after the king has fallen by Jason’s spear, Jupiter intervenes. With the dawn Tiphys realizes that they have been fighting against a friendly state: it is a tragic recognition, like a frenzied Bacchanal’s return to her senses. Jason is filled with grief over his host of yesterday and arranges for elaborate funeral honours. This affords an opening for an exposition of the philosophy of the soul and of conscience by the soothsayer Mopsus, who ordains ceremonies of expiation. Artificial scapegoats are employed, upon which, by a curious ritual magic, the anger of the hell-powers is to be diverted, and so the Argonauts row away light-hearted. The rebound from sorrow to happiness is reflected in the jocular rivalry among the oarsmen and by the humorous description of the “crab” caught by Hercules which smashes his oar and sends him floundering back on several others. Fresh trouble, however, comes with another landing: and some pretty description marks the story of how Hylas in hot pursuit of a stag stoops to drink at a brook and is drawn into it by a water-nymph. A series of similes illustrates the restless anxiety of Hercules as he calls in vain for the missing youth:

“Hylas” again and “Hylas” yet again He shouts through distant wilds. But naught replies Save woods and wandering echo’s rivalry.[1293]

The Argonauts become impatient over the prolonged absence of Hercules, and debate (with traces of the rhetoric in a controuersia) whether they should sail without him. In the end, after Jason, with reluctance, has loosed the cable, his men grieve to miss the lion’s skin and see the empty bench:

As the ship goes, all yet shout “Hercules” And “Hylas” all—names lost amidst the waves.[1294]

In Book IV the chief incidents are the appearance of Hylas in a vision to announce his fate to Hercules; the arrival of the Argo at the land of the Bebryces, whose arrogant boxer-king, Amycus, is humbled by Pollux; Orpheus’s song of Io’s transformation into a heifer, in reference to the legendary name of the Bosphoros; the freeing of blind old Phineus from the torment of the Harpies, and his foretelling of the main stages of the Argonauts’ adventures; the narrow escape of the Argo from the Clashing Rocks (“how,” reflects Jason, “could they on their return voyage ever thread their way through again?”—a hint of the poet’s intention to bring them back by a different route); and the attainment of the Euxine, where a dull and unpoetic description is inserted. Their welcome from the prince of the Mariandyni is all the warmer because, like them, he loathed King Amycus: as Valerius remarks in one of his comparatively few sententiae,

Sure bond it is to face the selfsame foe.[1295]

At the beginning of Book V death has thinned the number of the Argonauts, and fresh comrades join who relate their exploits in following the arms of Hercules against the Amazons. By night the noise of the Chalybes can be heard at work on implements of war—evil inventions which had brought into activity the Hates, the Angers and the avenging Fury. Caucasus is next sighted—the scene of Prometheus’s torment, and it so chances that Hercules has arrived to free the Titan that very day. Next comes the first sight of the Colchian land, with a fresh invocation to mark a new portion of the epic. Their hardest task is now before the Argonauts, and Jason reminds them that nothing must prevent their bringing back the Fleece:

Necessity should never know a qualm (rebus semper pudor absit in artis).

Medea, King Aeetes’s daughter, after a night of ominous dreams, is early astir with her handmaidens. She is likened to Proserpine:

As o’er Hymettus’ flowery ridge in spring Proserpina once led the dance, or ’neath Sicilian crag, by Pallas stepping close, Yet linked to loved Diana, and more tall Than any, with no rival in her train Till that day when she blenched and at the sight Of Hell had all her comeliness dispelled.[1296]

Valerius describes her, when she first sees the strangers, as a shy girl with nothing in her manner to suggest the sorceress. She depends for reassurance on her old nurse, who recognizes the aliens as Greeks. The mutual impressions of hero and heroine follow: she, reduced to silence, draws back a few steps, but has eyes for him alone; he concentrates attention on her as a princess among the foreign women. Answering his courteous appeal, Medea declares herself daughter of Aeetes and instructs him about his way. So Jason proceeds shrouded in a mist of invisibility to the audience-chamber of the king in the Sun-god’s temple. In all this there is a contamination of epic sources, and a modelling of incidents upon earlier poems. The meeting of Jason and Medea is based partly on Odysseus’s meeting with Nausicaa in Homer, partly on Aeneas’s meeting with Venus under the guise of a huntress in the Aeneid. Jason, like Aeneas, proceeds in a miraculous cloud of concealment. The first interview with royalty in the Argonautica., as in the Aeneid, takes place in a temple. Just as there were tableaux on the walls from the Trojan war to interest the hero of the Aeneid, so for Jason there are provided, thanks to the prophetic skill of Vulcan, pictures of the Golden Fleece and the coming expedition of the Argonauts. This parallelism is one of the cramping conditions of ancient epic, and when it passes the bounds of the pleasantly reminiscential the reader feels that the poet has sacrificed his individuality to standard authority.

Jason’s claim to possess the Fleece angers Aeetes, but he dissembles and promises it as recompense if the Argonauts will help him against the menace of his brother Perses. It is a promise which causes commotion among the gods.

Much of the fighting against Perses and his catalogued allies in Book VI is wearisome. It is one of the innovations made on the story by Valerius, but we do not follow Jason on the battle-field with the love-lit gaze of Medea, when Juno, disguised as Medea’s sister, has led her to the town walls to watch the conflict. There is a note of pity for this girl ignorant of coming ill and the victim of a scheming goddess:

So gleams the lily white, pre-eminent Amid the hues of spring; but short her life: Her glory hath brief flourishing—e’en now The dark wings of the South o’ershadow her.[1297]

Jason performs deeds of prowess and Perses is defeated. With nightfall the din of battle dies away.

If Book VI has dull stretches, the last two books are the most attractive and possess great human interest. This is notably true of Book VII; for it traces the growth of Medea’s passion for Jason, the mental conflict between loyalty to her father and love for a stranger, and the avowal of their affection by the lovers in the temple of Diana. The speeches, though coloured inevitably with some rhetoric and some Virgilian echoes, show real emotion.

Aeetes disdainfully breaks his promise and makes a new proposal—the fire-breathing bulls must be yoked by Jason, and the crop of warriors from the dragon’s teeth must be sown. His perfidy meets with a spirited reply from Jason:

Not this the recompense, Aeetes, nor The hope you offered to the Argonauts, When first we donned our armour for your walls. What means this change of faith? What craft is planned By your commands? Another Pelias, Another ocean here I see! Nay, come, Ye princes all, combine to hunt my life With hate and hests. But ne’er shall my right hand Or hope desert me. ’Tis my wont to bow To orders, not to quail before the hard. One boon I pray for—whether yonder crop Whelms me with its own spear-growth, or the fire To-morrow swallows me with threatening maw— Send hence to Pelias’ cruel ears the news That here died men, and that, had you kept faith, Jason could have regained his country safe.[1298]

Alarmed for the hero, the lovesick princess wanders distraught in the palace; and still more passion is breathed into her soul by Venus under the form of Circe, daughter of the Sun. Her inward struggle is vividly represented—which shall she favour, father or alien? She is trapped (prensa). Would that earth could swallow her, and so she might escape accursed suggestions. Now she will, now she will not betray her father; but at last, overcoming scruples, she turns to her most potent drugs to aid Jason. Possessed of these magical charms, she passes out into the night, and, after a final hesitation, through the city gates. Here Medea is a dual personality, now a timid maiden with a sense of modesty and a regard for duty, now an astonishingly powerful enchantress capable of controlling the passage of Night and the heavenly bodies. In Diana’s temple they confront each other. Jason breaks silence:

Pray, maiden, act not like thy cursed sire; Unkindness fits no countenance like thine.[1299]

Protesting against the king’s ingratitude and perfidy, he declares his unalterable resolution:

Ne’er shall I quit this land without the Fleece: Thou shalt not first behold me fail my race.[1300]

Scarce lifting her eyes, the Colchian princess half resentfully, half scornfully, asks Jason why he ever came to her land; why he, a Thessalian foreigner, should look for aid from her. Her final entreaty is that, finding help elsewhere, he should let her go back to her father innocent as yet of treachery. But Jason snatches the proffered charms with avidity; henceforth irrevocably she is the guilty betrayer of her father. Round her lover she must put a sevenfold spell, and instruct him how to face the dread crop of warriors:

Be mindful, pray, of me: Medea’s self Shall ever in return remember thee.[1301]

She calls him hospes and he calls her coniunx, a contrast designed to recall Dido and Aeneas;[1302] and when Jason imprecates fire and destruction upon himself if he should forget Medea’s sacrifice of royalty and home, the tragedy of their broken love (though Valerius never completed the tale) is foreshadowed. The lists are made ready for his ordeal against the fire-breathing bulls and the furrow-sprung warriors; and Jason, with the aid of Medea’s magic and counsel, proves victorious.

Book VIII: Only one course is now open to Medea. In terror at her own acts and afraid of her father, she bids farewell to the palace and joins her lover in the forest. There is still the Fleece to win. To enable Jason to carry it off, she charms the guardian Dragon to sleep, though, as she bends over the prostrate beast which hitherto she has fed, she cannot but utter her sorrow for it when it wakes to realize the theft. But now there is need for despatch; and the supporting tree yields up the Fleece to the hero, while melancholy gloom gathers in the place; but elsewhere the land is lit up by the brilliant gold as he bears it away. Cheers rise from his men: the Argo draws near to meet him; and he hastens aboard with Medea.

Meanwhile dismay invades the palace on the discovery of her flight. Her mother, who has hitherto played no part, comes into the story with a rhetorical apostrophe to her fugitive daughter—she would fain scratch the face of the robber; she would have Fleece or any other sacred thing taken, if only Medea were given back; and details (singula) now too late recur to the queen’s mind that should have betrayed Medea’s love for the Thessalian; that was why she had no appetite (nullae dapes)! The scene changes: the lonely princess is at sea, the one woman among foreigners, uncertain whether the man for whom she has sacrificed so much will make her his bride. This anxiety ends, however, with their marriage in the island of Peuce. But the festivities are disturbed by the arrival of Medea’s brother Absyrtus with a fleet which Valerius wishes his readers to believe was very suddenly built. The Argonauts grumble over the prospect of attack from their Colchian pursuers, and would restore the girl if they might keep the Fleece. Jason does not hold out boldly against his men’s advice, but, with groans and qualms about his plighted troth, meditates treachery to his bride. So, within less than one hundred lines of the abrupt close, Valerius brings out the worst in Jason’s character. Divining his cowardice, Medea remonstrates with argument and question and irony. Is she a captive on the vessel? May she not hear the plans proposed?

Most faithful husband mine, I know no fear; Yet pity me and keep thy marriage vows At least as far as some Thessalian port— Then cast me off in thine own house! Thou knowest ’Twas thou, and not thy crew, swore faith to me. Perchance they may have right to give me up; But thou hast not the same prerogative, And I must drag thee back with me; for I, The guilty maid, am not their only quest: All on this ship alike are fugitives.[1303]

Is he afraid, she asks, of her brother’s ships? Still even against a greater fleet she deserves to be defended.

Would God my love had not dared all for thee, But felt a scruple! Nay, bethink thee now Of fresh commands—Alack, is cruelty So tongue-tied? Can this shamefast mien of thine Bode aught but harm? I ask thee, who wert once Mine own loved Jason—is it right that I, That I, with suppliant breath, should pray to thee?[1304]

A night of agony over Jason’s pusillanimous ingratitude has wrought a change on the beautiful girl:

She comes not now the glory of her race Nor the illustrious grandchild of the Sun, Nor yet the flower of youthful savagedom, As once when from the tree Chaonian She bore the radiant Fleece in joy and ’mid The mighty names of Greece on Pallas’ prow Stood forth a Maid that seemed the Goddess’ peer.[1305]

Swayed two ways, Jason tries to say soothing words to Medea, and the epic breaks off leaving its hero discredited. The poet has, however, enlisted our sympathies for Medea, as Virgil has done for Dido.

Even the sketch just given serves to show that Valerius was not a slavish imitator of Apollonius of Rhodes. Certainly he owed him much in episodes, similes and ideas. But under each of these three heads he also shows independence. Episodes are amplified, abbreviated, or transferred, and original episodes are introduced; if some similes are copied, fresh ones are invented; and, if there is a certain amount of close rendering of the Greek text, there is, besides, a great proportion of the poem which is due not merely to borrowings from Homer and the Latin of Virgil, Ovid, Lucan and Seneca’s tragedies, but to Valerius’s own genius. Thus, while it is instructive to estimate his debt to Apollonius, it is equally instructive to remember the contrasts between them, and competent critics have studied this question.[1306] Broadly, in construction and probability of narrative he excels his Greek forerunner; but Valerius is most distinctively himself when he displays his gift of description, which is, on the whole, free from the flagrant vices of rhetoric and sometimes reaches a high level of beauty, and when he applies his psychological ability to the character of Medea. One cannot fail to see that in his unfolding of her love he is not tied to the Apollonian account: one notes the influence of Virgil’s Dido: one suspects Ovid’s influence as well; but there is no reason to deny to an artist like Valerius his own large share in elaborating his heroine’s passion.

It is, on several grounds, likely that the incompleteness of the epic was caused by the author’s death rather than by the ravages of time.[1307] Some of the charges of inconsistency and disconnectedness brought against Valerius by critics might have been averted, it is contended, had he lived to revise his epic. All the same, it must be remembered that Valerius took years over his work and might never have removed such blemishes. As Professor Summers points out, Statius’s echoes of Valerius’s language suggest familiarity with his poem; but of about a score of allusions which Statius makes to the Argonautic legend none bears on the return voyage of the heroes, and this is just the portion which is missing in Valerius. An interesting problem turns on the author’s design for finishing his epic. One may conjecture that he contemplated four more books to equate the number with Virgil’s twelve; and it is a plausible guess that he would have, in his closing books, evinced still more independence of his Greek model. Since he elects to place Jason’s marriage in Peuce, he presumably would have dropped the visit to Phaeacia. There is another feature which, while it illustrates his individuality, at the same time lends colour to the belief that he meant to bring his heroes into connexion with Italy.[1308] This feature is the frequency of the allusions to Rome and her customs which the poet engrafts upon this epic of early Greek mariners. Surprise is scarcely felt that at the beginning we should find his autobiographic hint about the Sibyl’s tripod in his house, or his references to recent Roman history in his invocation to Vespasian, or his desire that his poem should be famed in Latin-speaking cities.[1309] But the recurrent Roman note in the course of the narrative is more significant. Jove is made to foreshadow the coming of empires which must include Rome; Hypsipyle’s renown is to last as long as Roman chronicles; and allusions are made to Jupiter of the Alban mount and to the connexion of Rome with Troy.[1310] In the sixth book there is an anticipation of the military emblems of Rome; a likening of the battle between Perses and Aeetes to internecine strife between Roman legions; and illustrations are drawn from shipwrecks on the Latian coast and from hunting in Umbria.[1311] In the next book Jason is said to be as much dismayed by Aeetes’s refusal to keep his promise as a Tuscan pilot looking for the Tiber mouth but blown upon the quicksands off Africa; and Venus, disguised as daughter of the Sun, pretends to be consort of the Italian Picus and “queen of the Tuscan main.”[1312] These and other instances incline one to believe that Valerius was leading up to a sort of Italianization of his Greek theme in its later phases, in which case he would have been at once more national and more Virgilian. For, just as the later half of the Aeneid has its scenes laid in Italy, so Valerius may have decided to imitate Virgil in bringing his Argonauts back by a route more familiar to a Roman reader than that by which they ventured out to Colchis. If the adventurers were to sail homewards by way of the North Sea past Britain and Gaul, this would have fittingly accorded with the address to Vespasian in the opening book; and poetic justice might have been done by prolonging the epic to include the death of Jason’s enemy Pelias.

The fact that there is only one classical mention of Valerius (that by Quintilian recognizing his death as a loss to literature) does not suggest that he had a wide vogue. Yet his influence is traceable in Statius and Silius;[1313] and Juvenal may be thinking of him in his gibe at the conveyance of “the gold of the stolen fleecelet.”[1314] After age-long oblivion, attention was once more directed to his poem by Poggio’s discovery at St. Gall in 1417 of a manuscript containing Argonautica I-IV, 317. In spite of considerable poetic quality Valerius is not a readily quotable author. There is little criticism of life in him—little even in the way of the sententia: so readers have not found much to lay hold on, and his influence has been lessened. Thus, in estimating the classical sources of a work like William Morris’s Life and Death of Jason it is the relation to Apollonius rather than that to Valerius that one makes prominent.

The language[1315] of Valerius is an interesting complex. As in the treatment of his epic theme he was both borrower and innovator, so with his style. Deeply influenced by Virgil and other predecessors, he yet strikes into fresh paths of expression: he even coins words. Among the compounds (many of them dactylic) which he loves, he revives old epithets like auriger, omnituens; uses rare ones, like astrifer, gemmifer, luctifer (in Seneca also); notably shares some with Ovid like piniger, reparabilis, turifer; and others, like monstrifer and monstrificus, with the elder Pliny. The adjectives astrifer, flammiger, undisonus recur in Statius; flammifer (which is Ennian, Lucretian and Ovidian), auricomus (Virgilian), securiger, and others, recur in Silius. But he has adjectives that are entirely his, aegisonus, arcipotens, implorabilis, intemerandus, soligena, just as he has ἅπαξ εἰρημένα among his verbs like protono, superincendo, and among his nouns like a(d)spiramen, lustramen, ouatus (“rejoicing”), memoratrix, mugitor, the last term being used in one of his references to volcanic activity:

As bellower Vesuvius pants, when he In wrath awakes the panic-stricken towns.[1316]

There are also forcible applications of words in new connexions, or extensions of meaning: e.g. Medea adnuitur thalamis (V. 258), “Medea is granted to the marriage-couch”; inuasit habenis murmur (VII. 605), “attacked the horse’s neighing with the reins,” i.e. “set bit and bridle to its mouth”; ueteris sub nocte cupressi (I. 774), “beneath the night-like shadow of an old cypress-tree,” resembling the phrase noctem implicat (VII. 598) of entangling a bull in a cloud of darkness, or Juvenal’s tenebrae for “a dingy hovel.” Fragor expresses vigorously news that comes in a crash:

A startling rumour spreads it thro’ the town— “The King is summoning a thousand hands!” (regemque fragor per moenia differt mille ciere manus, I. 753).

The mixture of convention and boldness in Valerius makes him an intensely interesting linguistic study.

Despite his profound debt to Virgil, and traces of lines with a still more archaic flavour, the technique of Valerius’s verse is predominantly Ovidian. He recalls Ovid in dactylic movement, in lack of varied pauses, and in smooth versification. This smoothness of post-Ovidian poetry, which was based on a comparative avoidance of elision, missed that subtle entanglement of word with word which Virgil artistically employed to counteract some of the heaviness of the Latin language. Valerius has not the technical skill of Statius in hexameters: he is often monotonous in rhythm, in repetitions of words within a few lines, and in over-symmetric arrangement. Yet he is less monotonous than Lucan, although when the test is intellect, Valerius is unquestionably Lucan’s inferior. It is easy to illustrate some phases of his monotony: in Book VIII, a short one of 466 lines, one can count at least 35 dactylic verbs (implicat, prosilit, etc.) forming the first foot of the line, without counting other dactylic words like uellera (at least four times), immemor (at least twice). Some of his endings too are monotonous: e.g. proles four times in less than ninety lines in Book IV,[1317] although we may accept this as an echo of ancient epic phraseology. It is also convention which prompts his alliterative effects such as these in his later books:[1318]

impingit pecorique pauor qualesue profundum per chaos occurrunt caecae sine uocibus umbrae (VII. 401-2)

or

iam magis atque magis mentem super alta ferebat (ib. 473)

or

fata domus luctumque ferens fraudemque fugamque (VIII. 135)

More subtle is the onomatopoeic effect which he achieves in describing the gloomy sea-cave

That knows nor daylight’s gifts nor starry flame, Ill-starred abode that rocks to ocean’s boom (infelix domus et sonitu tremibunda profundi).

To the credit of his common sense, he is less rhetorical than either Lucan or Statius. He rants less. He indulges in fewer epigrams. In eight books his sententiae do not exceed a dozen.[1319] Doubtless, his similes are too numerous,[1320] but they are, as a rule, brief. Unfortunately, though some have beauty, others are in bad taste, like the comparison of the love-sick Medea to a dog going mad; and others are far-fetched, like the comparison of the flight of the Harpies to the rain of ashes from Vesuvius in eruption.[1321] He has his lapses into absurdities, hyperbole and artificiality. In the battle of Book VI there are extravagant details which recall Lucan; and the danger of mythology can be seen when Jason, instead of the simple question, “Where is Hercules?” asks, “Where is he who was equal to the monsters sent by his stepmother?”[1322] Such mythological allusions play their part along with inverted order of words and compact forms of expression in producing an effect sometimes far from clear: even though he is relatively free from laboured conceits, he falls far short of Virgil’s classic lucidity. There is undoubtedly in Valerius descriptive power, varied incident, vivid narrative, and the perennial attraction of the way of a man with a maid. Except for this last psychological interest his merits are mainly related to the objective and concrete with little to suggest that he had reflected profoundly on life or had any guidance or solace to offer to humanity.

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V. SILIUS ITALICUS

Life—An ancient Southey—Evidence for date of the Punica—Scheme of the seventeen books—Weaknesses—Certain merits—Stoic notes—Sententiae—Imitations and innovations—Virgilian echoes.

Few literary figures of the first century are so well known biographically as Ti. Catius Silius Italicus.[1323] The information comes mainly from a letter by the younger Pliny (III. vii), who, writing in A.D. 101 about the recent death of Silius, took the opportunity to sketch his career. Other facts of his life are learned from Martial and Tacitus.[1324] He is called Silius Italicus in MSS., in Pliny and in Tacitus; Martial calls him either Silius or Italicus; his full name we know from inscriptions.[1325] It is argued that, if “Italicus” implied birth at Italica in Spain, Martial would have expressly claimed him for a countryman. Pliny’s evidence that he was over seventy-five when he died enables us to date his birth as A.D. 25 or 26. Under Nero he had got an evil name as an informer. He was the last Neronian consul (A.D. 68), and, in the struggle for the succession, a supporter of Vitellius, whom Cluvius Rufus and he attended at his interview with Flavius Sabinus in the Capitol. The reputation which he gained as proconsul of Asia in Vespasian’s time and his subsequent life of literary retirement did something to wipe out the stain of his ill-employed activity in Nero’s days. Leisure hours in intervals of writing were devoted to the reception of a circle of visitors and to learned discussions, presumably philosophical. His readings from his own works were planned to be practical tests of his friends’ critical judgement. In the later part of his life he left Rome for the quiet of Campania, from which not even the accession of the new emperor, Trajan, in A.D. 98, could lure him back. A connoisseur (φιλόκαλος, as Pliny says), he could not resist the temptation to buy fine country houses, in this respect becoming even more extravagant than his friend Pliny. He surrounded himself with books, statues and busts, above all venerating the portrait of Virgil, the anniversary of whose birth he observed more scrupulously than his own. Virgil’s tomb at Naples was to him a holy place (adire ut templum solebat). Before he attempted an epic, he had made some name in oratory, especially as a pleader in court.[1326] His death on his Neapolitan estate was due to voluntary starvation. A tumour from which he was suffering was pronounced incurable, and he decided to refrain from food. It was a Stoical resolution; and he had, in fact, relations with the Stoic philosopher Epictetus.[1327] Of two sons one predeceased him, the other reached the consulship and survived his father. Among additional facts derived from Martial we learn that one of his villas had been Cicero’s, that Virgil’s grave was on one of his properties, and that he began his Punica after his consulship. The ascription to him of the epitome known as the Ilias Latina or Homerus Latinus is mentioned elsewhere.

A diligent but usually uninspired writer, fitly described by Pliny as having composed with more pains than genius (maiore cura quam ingenio), Silius must have resembled Southey in his methodically calculated production of verse; and his Punica may be said to occupy in Latin literature a position not unlike that of Madoc in English. By A.D. 88, the date of Martial’s fourth book, the plan of Silius’s epic was apparently known and friends were acquainted with parts of it.[1328] By the end of 92[1329] some at least of the Punica, wildly praised by Martial as immortal, was in book form; but the reference to Domitian’s war in Silius, Book III, 607, cannot have been written before that same year, as the Sarmatian campaign was fought in A.D. 92-93. Since XIV. 686 refers to Nerva (96-98), we may assign the latest books to the beginning of Trajan’s reign. It has been contended that so comparatively early a part of the work as Book VII must have followed the death of Domitian (96), on the ground that the introduction of Minerva there as hostile to Rome would have been unsuitable during the life of an emperor attached to the cult of that goddess.[1330]

Silius’s narrative of the Second Punic War is told in over 12,200 hexameters distributed among seventeen books. Of the three conflicts between Rome and Carthage the author realizes, at the outset of his task (I. 12-14), that this middle one demanded the greatest efforts from the combatants, and that the victors themselves were imperilled. Book I relates how in Dido’s city Juno pits against fate the war-loving and indomitable leader Hannibal, who resolves to strike a blow at Rome from Spain by besieging Saguntum. The Saguntine danger is laid before Rome; then in Book II Rome is embroiled with Carthage; and Saguntum, after a heroic defence, is taken by Hannibal. During the fighting, Queen Asbyte, the Camilla of the Carthaginian side, falls, and the flight of the enemy before Hannibal as he seeks to avenge her is likened, in a typical simile, to the homeward flocking of birds or the swarming of bees to their hive:

As thro’ the gloaming late the evening star Drives on light wing the birds from quest of food Home to their nest, or as on Mount Hymet By Athens swarms of bees among the flowers Are summoned at the threat of watery cloud To their sweet waxen toil, and honey-fraught Haste to the grotto of their fragrant hive, And massed in flying throng the threshold fill With murmur hoarse.[1331]

Early in Book III there are digressions for the sake of descriptive writing. Neither the labours of Hercules on the portals of the temple where Hannibal seeks responses, nor the marvels (mira) of the inrushing tide are subjects possessing artistic necessity. The episode of the parting of Hannibal from his wife and child on the seashore is at once more natural and more relevant: it portrays her disappointment that she may not share his dangers; it also portrays his realization, as her ship waits, that the stirrings of ambition must tear him from her:

How differs unrecorded life from death![1332]

After such human motives it is weak to have intruded Jupiter’s designs for trying the Romans by peril and his despatch of Mercury to hasten Hannibal’s plans for the invasion of Italy. The catalogue of the Carthaginians and the crossing of Pyrenees, Rhone and Alps, with incidental episodes and risks, occupy the rest of the book. Opening with alarm in Italy, the next book narrates the fighting at the Ticinus and the Trebia. Warriors on the field after epic fashion are invoked in the second person and perform prodigies of valour, while the unreality is increased by bringing Hannibal on the scene attended by Panic, Terror and Rage. The disaster caused by the Carthaginian elephants at the Trebia suggests the reflection:

The test of manhood is adversity, And up Mount Difficult through jeopardy Strides Valour undismayed to Fame.[1333]

Amidst the rigours of the Apennines Hannibal has lost an eye, when senators arrive from Carthage to claim in sacrifice his son. The demand had been debated at home, supported by Hanno because of an old grudge, but bitterly opposed by Hannibal’s wife Imilce, whose creed concerning sacrifice is thus avowed:

What piety is sprinkling shrines with gore? Chief cause, alas! of guilt in feeble man Is not to know God’s nature. Go and pray Aright with holy incense and avert The barbarous ritual of butchery; For God is kind and kindred unto man (Mite et cognatum est homini Deus).[1334]

Book V is on Lake Trasimene, opening in legend and the mists of dawn, and then advancing, through Homeric armings and challenges, to the death of the consul Flaminius and to Hannibal’s chivalrous admiration for the bravery of his fallen enemies:

The brows still threaten and their looks are wrath. I fear a land so pregnant with a brood Of high-souled heroes may from Destiny Win power imperial and by very woes Yet subjugate the world.[1335]

Book VI is largely devoted to the story of Regulus taken from the first Punic War. His son, Serranus, severely wounded, reaches the door of Marus, one of his father’s old soldiers, who preaches endurance amidst the reverses of Rome:

In the ancestral way, most valiant Sir, Bear present hardship and our fortune’s swerve: So by Heaven’s law adown life’s sloping path Headlong thro’ chequered hazards rolls Time’s wheel (Per uarios praeceps casus rota uoluitur aeui).[1336]

The old man’s tale of Regulus is partly legendary, partly historical: it begins with dragon-fighting, and proceeds, not without rhetoric, to relate how Regulus kept his parole when the Carthaginian senate sent him to Rome in the vain hope that he would advocate an exchange of prisoners. There must always be a moral greatness in this story of self-abnegation and Stoic austerity:

Squalor and starveling meals and restless couch And strife with crowding ills he reckoned more Than vanquishing a foe; nor counted it So noble to escape adversity By care as by endurance to prevail.[1337]

And yet Silius’s long-drawn narrative has not the moving force of Horace’s brief treatment of the same episode in the third book of the Odes. The digression ends at line 552, where Silius returns to his true subject—panic in the city and Jupiter’s prompting of the Romans to entrust all to Fabius.

The saving of Rome by Fabius’s delaying tactics is the theme of Book VII. The digressions include the legend of the 300 Fabii told to Hannibal by a prisoner, a story of Bacchus occasioned by the Carthaginian inroad on the Falernian vineyards, and, at the approach of the Carthaginian fleet, the introduction of Nereids with the Virgilian cave of Proteus. The delays are not confined to the inaction of Fabius: Proteus is asked to prophesy, but first he must hark back to the Judgement of Paris. There is, however, a foil to Fabius’s caution in the impetuous Minucius, who is magnanimously rescued from the consequences of his foolhardiness by his colleague.

Book VIII forms a prelude to the battle of Cannae, as related in the two following books. The unreal device of Juno’s despatch of the nymph Anna to encourage Hannibal leads us back to the Dido story for a time.[1338] Then the narrative is resumed. The consuls have been changed, and Aemilius Paulus dreads the abyss to which the arrogance of his colleague Varro may lead. His arguments are stated in the debating manner of the schools,[1339] making brief ironical points one after another—“the impetuous consul fears that he might leave Rome’s ruin for another man’s consulate; it might be well to summon a consul from Carthage, for even a Carthaginian would not be so dangerous!” The catalogue of Italian warriors, extending to over 260 lines, gives a chance of introducing famous names. There is, for example, a Tullius, descended from King Tullus, and destined, as ancestor of Cicero, to give in later days a noble citizen to Ausonia: next follows a eulogy on the orator:

Beyond the Ganges heard and furthest Ind, His voice will fill the earth, and frenzied war Will bow before his lightning tongue, nor can Descendants hope for equal fame in speech.[1340]

So too there is a Scaevola, a Sulla, Nero the Sabine, a Piso, a Galba, a Brutus and others. Among the men of North Italy those are not forgotten who come from Virgil’s birthplace,

The home of Muses, Mantua, upraised By song Aonian to the stars, and peer Of Homer’s minstrelsy.[1341]

In the description of the battle of Cannae, Silius’s aim is not historical accuracy, but epic embellishment. His true model, therefore, is not such brief narratives as those in Polybius (III. 115-116) or Livy (XXII. 47-49), but the manner of the Iliad and the Aeneid, so that the account is expanded to fill nearly two books, IX and X; and is diversified by similes, divine interferences, Homeric slaughter, and episodes like the unwitting slaying of a father by a son. Though it be mythological, there is a grim suggestiveness in Charon’s rejoicing in the expectation of receiving the dead:

Glad on the pallid mere the Ferryman Now cleared the thwarts for ghosts that were to come;[1342]

and the poet has a conception of Roman greatness in adversity:

Would that hereafter, Roman, thou mayst face Fair fortune nobly as thou didst defeat. Be this thy last disaster! May Heaven consent Never to try if Trojan progeny Can bear a war so dread! I pray thee, Rome, That tremblest for thy destiny, to dry Thy tears and to adore thy wounds that must Bring thee renown unto eternity. Greater at no time shalt thou ever be: For soon the slippery pathway of success Shall make thee hold misfortune but a name.[1343]

There is nobility in Hannibal’s character as drawn by Silius, when he decrees funeral honours to the fallen consul, Paulus, and muses over his body:

How great thou liest in death! For me thou art More cause of triumph than those thousands slain. When fate shall call, such death be Hannibal’s, If Carthage be but safe;[1344]

and, later, in his address of almost envious farewell:

Go, glory of Ausonia, where needs Must go the souls for valiant action crowned. Thy fame is won by death illustrious. For me, my toils are yet in Fortune’s hands: I may not know the hazards that shall be.[1345]

The sorrow-stricken capital is again saved by Fabius, who wins a nation’s gratitude because he did not despair of the republic, though Silius unhappily uses the stilted expression, “he did not despair for the city of Laomedon’s descendants.”[1346] Indeed some twenty lines towards the close of the tenth book are full of indirect and far-fetched expressions.

Book XI brings Hannibal to Capua, where luxury begins its demoralizing work. The banquet has an obvious Virgilian basis. At Carthage the news of victory and the heap of rings from the fallen Romans fail to induce Hanno to join in the general plaudits for Hannibal. Instead, he advocates making terms with Rome, pleads war-weariness, and extols peace:

Peace is the best of blessings given to men To know: and Peace alone is better than Uncounted triumphs: Peace hath power to keep Our safety and make equal citizens.

In Book XII, with the coming of spring, Hannibal stirs forth from Capua, like a serpent after hibernating. Henceforward his luck wanes, for the Romans win their first victory in the war. Among those celebrated for bravery is Ennius, whose poetry is eulogized. Hannibal appears outside Rome and rides round the walls to reconnoitre; but Jupiter checks his plans by raising storm after storm. It is a ludicrous see-saw of good and bad weather.

Book XIII, the longest book (895 lines), contains, besides digressions, the recapture of Capua, and its rescue by Pan from burning though not from pillage. Sent to inspire mercy, Pan is minutely described—horned and horny-hoofed, peak-eared, bearded and tailed, nimble and sportive, carrying a shepherd’s staff, altogether a strangely incongruous figure in the midst of historical events. In Spain, the two Scipios—father and uncle to the younger Scipio, afterwards Africanus—meet their death; and this leads to a long passage founded on Aeneas’s visit to the Underworld in Aeneid VI. Scipio, as the ultimate victor, is a kind of hero for Silius. As in the Odyssey, sacrifice and the blood-trench are indispensable preliminaries to holding converse with departed spirits; but the interview with the shade of Appius Claudius becomes ridiculous when Scipio lectures the ghost on different ways of disposing of the dead. The Sibyl is asked to unfold the mysteries of the Underworld and of the different souls admitted through the Ten Gates. The infernal rivers, the personified evils of human life, and the monsters of mythology burden the description, and thereafter the wraiths of Scipio’s father and mother appear. Not only do the shades of Aemilius Paulus and of others killed at Cannae drink of the blood and speak, but Romans of ancient times appear as well as Hamilcar, Alexander the Great, and the god-like ghost of Homer. Among souls of the great fancied to be not yet incarnate are those of Pompey and Julius Caesar. When the Sibyl has foretold the eclipse of Hannibal’s career, Scipio returns to his men rejoicing.

In Book XIV the Muses are invoked to turn to Sicily, where Marcellus captures Syracuse after a defence prolonged by the mechanical ingenuity of the famous Greek mathematician Archimedes (who is referred to,[1347] but, owing to hexametric exigencies, not named). In Book XV the Roman Senate anxiously consider the question of finding a general to succeed the two Scipios killed in Spain: and at this juncture Silius introduces the young Scipio confronted with the figures of Virtue and Pleasure after the model of the fabled Choice of Hercules. Gaily attired, Pleasure is one whose

frolic eyes With wayward movement darted flame on flame.[1348]

Her alluring promises, coloured with an Epicurean idea of bliss,[1349] contrast with the appeal directed by Virtue to the celestial element ennobling man. Virtue’s offer is “not purple or scents but victory over the enemy”; and, on Scipio’s acceptance, Pleasure retires displeased, but satirically prophesying that one day her hour will come in Rome. So Scipio mounts the rostra asking for control of the war. He afterwards justifies his selection by the capture of Nova Carthago in Spain. The book is crowded with other incidents such as the alliance of Philip of Macedon with Carthage, the funeral honours paid by Hannibal to Marcellus, and the defeat by Claudius Nero of Hannibal’s brother Hasdrubal at the Metaurus on his way to join Hannibal. Book XVI recounts Scipio’s operations in Africa and Spain, and his games to honour the dead—chariot-race, foot-race, sword-fight, javelin competition, in which traditional epic elements are discernible. His request in Rome to be allowed to transfer the war to Africa, though hotly opposed by Fabius, is granted by the Senate: so in Book XVII he crosses to Africa and is thus the means of forcing Hannibal to quit Italy, to his poignant sorrow.[1350] After a display of Homeric prowess by Scipio and deceits practised by Juno on Hannibal, the decisive victory of Zama is won. Hannibal may be overwhelmed, he reflects, but Jupiter himself can never blot out the memory of Cannae, nor will the nations pass over his deeds in silence. He will live still to be a menace to Rome.[1351] Scipio recrosses the sea to hold his triumph, with Syphax and Hanno as notable captives, and the work closes with an apostrophe to him as the unvanquished sire, in merit comparable with Quirinus or Camillus, and truly claimed in Rome to be an offspring of the gods.

Even a summary betrays many of Silius’s weaknesses. His theme, the struggle of two peoples for world-supremacy, as derived from Livy, was a great one; and yet his quest after poetic embroidery divorced it from reality.[1352] He makes gods interfere where a historian would investigate causes and motives: he relates battles, not as matters of strategy, but as conglomerates of individual combats. Military history is, therefore, not to be demanded from him; but a more penetrating genius, even though he might in epic spirit, like Silius, have concentrated largely on occurrences affecting the heroic figure of Hannibal, would still have placed in true perspective the evolution of the conflict. As it is, one would never grasp from Silius the significance of events like the siege of Syracuse and the younger Scipio’s Spanish campaign; nor would one learn what the defeat of Carthage meant for the world. Traces there are, it is true, of the imperial note, but Silius does not convey through his poem a sense of the greatness of Rome as his master Virgil did. Author and reader are alike oppressed by the outworn conventions of invocations, apostrophes, similes,[1353] lineages and colloquies of antagonists who fight in the Homeric fashion, intervention of mythological deities, unilluminating geography, and lack-lustre catalogues of names, in using which Silius has no Virgilian or Miltonic gift of making beautiful music.[1354] All this goes to constitute the head and front of his offending—he is, taken altogether, dull and uninspiring. Hardly any of his characters live. Hannibal may be said to live at times, Scipio scarcely at any time: and interminable longueurs, verging on the dismal, force one in the end to wonder what imaginable constraint other than editorial necessity should ever drag one to a second perusal of these seventeen ponderous books.

Yet, even so, Silius has merit. He can be rhetorical, but he is not so insistently in search of striking points as the other epic-writers of his century. A curious nemesis overtakes him when he imitates; for some of his least natural effects arise from his enslavement to the example of Homer; Virgil and Lucan. It is particularly to the baleful influence of Lucan that one must ascribe his misdirected attempts at realism. One wishes that Silius, over his slain warriors, had felt a portion of the Virgilian pity; but instead he overdoes his descriptions. The last notes of a bugler, mortally hurt at the Ticinus, pass lingeringly through his instrument after his lips are already mute in death; the final breath of a gigantic soldier stirs the dust on the plain; a head is struck off, but the body runs on from its own impetus; or a victim’s murmured appeals continue after his head is severed.[1355] Lucanesque reminiscences overpaint the naval engagement off Syracuse in Book XIV—a man is cut in two by a prow; oars splash blood; hands grasping an enemy ship are hacked off and carried away still clinging; open wounds admit the sea.[1356] In similarly exaggerative manner he makes corpses bridge a river,[1357] and copies more than once Lucan’s idea of the wounded having no room to fall.[1358] Yet there are not nearly so many of these excesses as in Lucan; and there are comparatively few strained conceits, like the topsy-turvy one, which he approves sufficiently to repeat, of fighters avenging their deaths in advance by abundant slaughter.[1359] More often he is straightforward and non-rhetorical, with touches of natural description, as of the river Ticinus crystal-clear and gliding softly between shady banks to the notes of birds;[1360] with an occasional eye for colour, as where he marks the rosy dawn over the blue waters, the glint of the Roman arms at Cannae, or the Carthaginian priest’s robe of blue on which precious stones glitter;[1361] or, again, with a gleam of romance to light up the catalogue of Hannibal’s host, when from the far eastern gardens of the Hesperides came a leader,

Who in that faëry woodland by the sea Beheld the golden fruitage mid the leaves.[1362]

Traces of Stoic thought in Silius may be in part prompted by the Stoicism recurrent in Lucan’s epic, but may conceivably be due to its contemporary prevalence. Among instances may be cited the unflinching constancy of the slave tortured by the Carthaginian whose “mind remains untouched, surmounting pain with smiles”; Decius’s claim that nature has granted no such boon to man as the open doorway out of life; the rivalry between Pleasure and Virtue for control over Scipio; and the fortitude with which Hannibal, when his brother’s head is exhibited on a spear,

checked his tears And by endurance made disaster less.[1363]

His sententiae, because not too numerous to be tedious, are the more effective. Some of the most telling are “The test of manhood is adversity” (IV. 603); “Banish delay: short-lived is fortune’s smile” (IV. 732); “War must have craft: a leader’s stout arm wins less fame” (V. 100); the cynical observation “in happy days the altars seldom reek” (VII. 89); “Anger against one’s country is sin” (VII. 555 succensere nefas patriae); “never doth love abandon hope” (VIII. 95 non unquam spem ponit amor); “valour is her own most fair reward” (XIII. 663); and Alexander’s counsel on celerity in fighting:

Unhonoured is the craft of long-drawn war: Boldness must end campaigns: faint hardihood Ne’er raised itself above its jeopardy.[1364]

In spite of his debt to Virgil and Lucan, Silius gives signs of originality in his language. Occasionally he ventures on bold expressions: “a draught of Hannibal inflames” his soldiers (I. 345, haustusque medullis Hannibal exagitat); and, in reference to Capuan demoralization, “the yelps of vice (XI. 426 uitia adlatrantia)[1365] shake a character so far unsmirched by prosperity.” He employs a large number of compound adjectives, especially in -fer and -ger. Some are Lucretian words transmitted through Virgil like aestifer, saetiger, horrificus. The adverb regifice he shares with Ennius. Many of his compounds had been used by Ovid and Lucan. Others cannot easily, if at all, be discovered elsewhere; uiticola, austrifer, nubiuagus, pharetriger, criniger (possibly in Lucan, unless he wrote cirrigeros in Phars. I. 463). Diffulminat seems to be Silius’s own invention. It is to be expected that he should share several compounds with his contemporaries, e.g. with Valerius Flaccus, luctificus (also in Cicero and Virgil), securiger (also in Ovid), gemmifer (in Propertius and Pliny), and with Statius uuifer, sceptriger and other words. Whether these last are instances of the influence of Silius on Statius cannot be determined, but Statius certainly borrowed the gold-digger of Dalmatia from Silius’s “greedy Asturian.”[1366] Silius’s use of sonipes, quadrupes and cornipes for equus (which he does not however entirely renounce) becomes wearisome.

Apart from Virgilian influence on incidents like the cave of Proteus (VII. 419 sqq.), tree-felling for funeral pyres (X. 527 sqq.), the banquet at Capua (XI. 267 sqq.), the Sibyl’s exposition of the lower world in Book XIII, and the funeral games of Book XVI (down to the detail of fouling transferred from the foot-race of the Aeneid to a chariot-race), there are frequent reminiscences of Virgil’s language in such phrases as quaerentia lumina caelum (VI. 11) or ille quidem cruda mente et uiridissimus irae (V. 569). Still more old-fashioned echoes are his ac tuba terrificis fregit stridoribus auras (V. 189);[1367] ensis contunditur ense, pes pede uirque uiro teritur (IX. 325);[1368] and the ancient legal form capital (XIII. 155). Silius did not write in a style so elaborate as that of Valerius Flaccus or Statius, and he did not try to be so clever as Lucan; but he is composite enough to be acquitted of bald simplicity. His hexameters are often highly alliterative, some lines having alliteration on three different consonants. There is much also which proves the metrical influence of Ovid, though Silius is less dactylic and moves less lightly than any of the epic poets of his time.

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VI. STATIUS

Statius and his father—Dates of publication—Lost works—Friends—His times—The Thebaid and its twelve books—Mythology—Sources—Influence of Antimachus and Virgil—Achilleid—His epic fame—Siluae—Qualities of his occasional poems—Style—Artificiality and conceits—Compounds and Similes—Metre.

P. Papinius Statius,[1369] a Neapolitan whose miscellaneous poems reflect many aspects of Rome in the Flavian age, is, even if judged solely by his posthumous influence, a considerable figure in the annals of epic. For his life our main source of information lies in his own Siluae. The date of his birth is a matter of inference, and the tendency is now to place it earlier than once was common. A passage formerly taken to mean that he was on the threshold of life at his father’s death does not really bear that sense,[1370] and, while a reference to his own old age (senium)[1371] in the Siluae need not be literally pressed, it is most likely that these poems were written in mature years. For several reasons his birth-date cannot be put later than A.D. 45. His native town was Naples (mea Parthenope, Silv. I. ii. 260-261), a meeting-place of Greek and Roman culture, where his father, a man of good family, was a celebrated teacher. The lament (epicedion) on his death (Silv. V. iii.) tells how his father possessed poetic skill, had won victorious contests in poetry, kept a popular school, turned out pupils successful in after life, trained his son’s taste, and encouraged the epic on Thebes. The elder Statius’s affection for his wife, the poet’s mother, was only one of many endearing qualities which explain the depth of the younger man’s grief in bereavement. Before his father’s death Statius had begun to make a mark. He had won the prize for poetry at the Neapolitan Augustalia. At Rome he made money by such a libretto as that on Agaue supplied to the actor Paris,[1372] and his recitationes from his works attracted good audiences.[1373] Statius senior certainly did not die till after the eruption of Vesuvius in A.D. 79, because a passage in the Siluae (V. iii. 205) shows that he contemplated a poem on it, as he had already celebrated the destruction in 69 of the temples on the Capitol. The passage reads as if he did not long survive the eruption; and yet, since he encouraged his son’s work on the Thebaid (Silv. V. iii. 233), he must have lived an appreciable time beyond its inception in A.D. 80. However that may be, he was no longer alive at the time of Statius’s memorable triumph in the Alban competition instituted by Domitian, and the earliest date assignable to this success with a poem on the emperor’s exploits is 89.

Meanwhile (apart from recitations) none of Statius’s extant work had been published; but he had long been elaborating his epic on the seven champions against Thebes. That poem, the Thebaid, was issued in twelve books shortly before[1374] the publication of the first book of the Siluae, which can be dated A.D. 92. Certain passages,[1375] it is true, in the Siluae refer to the author as still at work on the Thebaid; but they must be assumed to have been written, though not published, before 92. The poet’s farewell to a task of twelve years bears interesting testimony to his speculation on its claim to lasting renown, his complimentary attitude to Domitian, his knowledge that his own writings were being already studied, and above all his worshipful reverence for Virgil, the inspirer of his epic style:

Shalt thou, my lay of Thebes, my wakeful toil For twice six years, shalt thou far off endure, And, when thy maker is no more, be read? E’en now, be sure, fame hath made fair the way For thee, and seeks to show thy novelty To men unborn. E’en now our noble Prince Grants thee acquaintance; now Italian youths Learn thee by heart amain. Live on, I pray! Yet vie not thou with Virgil’s god-sent strain— Follow afar: his every step adore.[1376]

Attracted from the subject of Thebes to “the tale of Troy divine,” he was yet to attempt another epic; but, for an interval, he was free to collect some of his miscellaneous poems, and the first book of the Siluae was issued in the same year, as is inferred from its prefatory reference to the death of Rutilius Gallicus, prefect of Rome, whose recovery from illness is the theme of the fourth poem. This book, dedicated to the poet Stella, whose marriage is celebrated in the second poem, was followed during the poet’s lifetime by II, III and IV, all addressed to different friends. Book IV can be definitely dated, as its opening piece celebrates Domitian’s seventeenth consulate: the book is assigned to the summer of A.D. 95. It is a fair surmise that Book II had been published in 93 and Book III in 94. Book V may have been posthumously issued; for its preface to Abascantus bears solely on the first poem, and the fifth is incomplete.

Statius writes as if his attempted epic on Achilles had to yield place to the idea of an Italian subject—the wars of Domitian.[1377] He had begun his Achilleid in 95,[1378] and although it had not gone far beyond a single book, he gave public readings from it.[1379] But the final interruption came with his death. The presumption is that Statius did not outlive Domitian, whose assassination occurred in 96.

The lost works of Statius are the pantomime Agaue from the tragic Theban story of Pentheus; the epic on the German campaign of Domitian, of which four hexameters survive;[1380] and an epistle concerning the Thebaid sent to Vibius Maximus, the recipient of Statius’s Sapphics (Silv. IV. vii.), and an epitomator of Livy.[1381] From the ode to him and the allusion in the preface of Siluae, Book IV, we realize that Statius admired his literary power and felt gratitude for his inspiring encouragement while the Thebaid was being written.

Statius’s love for his native Naples is obvious in his works. It was thither that he repaired towards the end of his life, mortified by his defeat in the Capitoline contest of 94, though sustained by the sympathy of his wife Claudia. But he had lived much in Rome and at the Alban villa which he owed to the emperor. His circle of friends was representative of the age. It included Domitian himself, whom he flattered far more than was justified by the grant of a special water-supply or by invitations to dinner. It included also men prominent in public life like the prefect Rutilius, imperial secretaries like Claudius Etruscus and Abascantus, or men who combined literary tastes with national service, like the poet Arruntius Stella who rose to the consulship, and the historian Vibius Maximus who under Trajan became governor of Egypt. It is plain that Statius and Martial belonged to the same social grade; for Etruscus, Stella, and Lucan’s widow Polla appear in the works of both; and among other friends in common were Atedius Melior and Novius Vindex. But neither poet names the other, and the silence may be due to dislike.

The age was a tranquil one, favourable to aesthetic refinement rather than powerful creation; and Statius is its perfect counterpart in his quiet learning, power of polished expression, appreciation of beautiful scenes and beautiful works of art. We can discern his warmth of heart in the love he bears his father and his wife, and in his sorrow over the death of the little boy whom he adopted; for his marriage to Claudia, a widow with a daughter, proved childless. Very appropriately he contrasts a busy man of affairs with himself, a poet idly touching his lyre, but filled with a scholar’s veneration for Virgil:

Thy talents are alive; thy spirit, girt For mighty tasks, can face both foul and fair. But I, a singer whiling easeful hours, Quest after reputation’s airy joys: And, lo! I woo the dreamful happy shore, Where, newly landed in Ausonia, Parthenope found haven; there I touch With idle thumb my slender-stringéd lyre, And seated by the marge of Virgil’s shrine Take heart to hymn my mighty master’s grave.[1382]

We may rest assured that, while courtier-like he felt compelled to feign a celestial rapture in being a guest at Domitian’s table[1383] and to suggest that it outshone the Homeric banquet of King Alcinous or the Virgilian banquet of Queen Dido, still his secret preference must have been for some such feast of reason and flow of soul as he was safe to find when he dined with his poet-friend Vindex.[1384] At the board of that cultured connoisseur, gifted with unerring judgement of art-treasures, the menu—unlike that of Trimalchio in Petronius—did not consist of freakish whets to the appetite (ludibria uentris), but was in keeping with the literary talk and cheery jests which made a midwinter night fly[1385]—a night to mark with pearls (nox et Erythraeae Thetidos signanda lapillis). In these social surroundings we can best understand the personality of Statius.

One might feel a temptation to dismiss the Thebaid with a summary as brief as the twelve bald hexameters in the Codex Toletanus; but that would convey a beggarly impression of a narrative nearly 10,000[1386] lines long, in which, despite dull tracts, there are vigorous incidents and great moments. If Statius had studied the construction and proportions of his story more exactly, if he had condensed some and rigidly excised others of his episodes, the Thebaid would have gained in unity and attractiveness, while his readers and his reputation might have been increased by the reappearance as separate poems of the best among the banished portions. The following analysis may serve to confirm this.

Book I. Statius makes a dull start with frigid professions of ignorance as to where in the Theban story he should begin, and with equally frigid flattery of Domitian. The requisite note of gloom is struck in the fiendish prayer of the self-blinded Oedipus to the Fury Tisiphone that she should estrange his sons Eteocles and Polynices, and ensure discord through Eteocles’s refusal to keep his promise of letting his brother reign for a year in his stead at Thebes. Sharing none of Lucan’s objections to divine interference in epic action, the poet describes a council of Gods attended by Demigods, Rivers and Winds at which ruinous war between Thebes and Argos is ordained. Polynices, the prince exiled from Thebes, reaches Argos and during a terrific storm fights with another stranger to the land, Tydeus, for shelter by the palace door. The two combatants are received by King Adrastus, become fast friends, and are recognized by their host as the Lion (Polynices) and the Boar (Tydeus), destined to be his sons-in-law. At a royal banquet they see the two princesses, their future brides:

The face of men was new to them and set Them blushing; and together red and white Coursed o’er their glowing cheeks; their modest eyes Turned to their venerable sire once more.[1387]

The king’s tale of the dealings of Apollo with Argos owing to the death of the God’s child is a digression.

Book II. The woes of an accursed house work even beyond the grave. The ghost of Laius, father of Oedipus, escapes—to the envy of the other dead—from the lower world for the purpose of hardening Eteocles against his brother. Meanwhile at Argos there are wedding festivities, but also bad omens, when Argia is married to Polynices and Deipyle to Tydeus. The story of the fatal necklace of Harmonia worn by Argia is told incidentally. After twelve days of rejoicing, Polynices turns to his claims on Thebes:

Grief and mad anger gnawed his mind, and that Than which no heavier burden vexes men— Hope long deferred.[1388]

Tydeus undertakes a mission to Thebes to require from Eteocles observance of his pact; but Eteocles refuses and plots to waylay the envoy on his way back by ordering an ambush of fifty men to await him. Tydeus’s fight against his foes in the pass is one of the most spirited and saga-like passages of the Thebaid. His challenge to the lurking assassins is given in ringing tones:

“Step forth and face me. Out! To open ground! Why dread to dare? What cowardice is this? ’Tis I alone, alone, that offer fight.”[1389]

At the stone of the Sphinx he baffles their onset, slaying one after another:

Alarmed they miss their fellows, then they count. Their murder-lust is changed amid their grief Over the thinning of so strong a band (rarescere turbam).[1390]

One survivor is spared to take back the tidings to the treacherous king.

Book III. At the news there is sorrow in Thebes. To stir up Argos, Jupiter despatches Mars and overawes the gods into compliance with his will. The hush produced by his threats is likened to a windless calm in summer-time:

As when the ocean is becalmed amid Long surcease of the gales, and every shore Reposeth in an unresisting sleep, When drowsy summer fans the woodland leaves And clouds with scarce a breath; then do the pools And murmuring meres abate their height, and streams Are hushed, for burning suns have parched them dry.[1391]

Exultant in his chariot, Mars is met and reproached by Venus in vain. Tydeus, battle-worn and wounded, presents himself at the council of King Adrastus in Argos and relates his adventure. The debate is “war or no war?” The seer Amphiaraus, when consulted, foresees disaster, and, though reluctant to reveal the worst, opposes the impetuosity of Capaneus. The seer’s speech when induced to break his silence is a forcible effort. Argia pleads for hostilities. Her speech has an effective close in human feeling: she would have her royal father consent to the war which is the heart’s desire of her husband; but she knows that, when the parting comes and the bugles sound for the men who march away, she would wish it otherwise.

Book IV. King Adrastus decides on war in the third spring after Polynices left Thebes. The leaders are Adrastus, Polynices, Tydeus, Hippomedon, Capaneus, Amphiaraus and Parthenopaeus. The description of the forces of these seven warriors against Thebes forms a dull catalogue of blended geography and mythology. At Thebes the dejected king consults the prophet Teiresias, who advocates recourse to the oracles of the dead in a forest of gloom comparable to Lucan’s eerie forest near Massilia. Statius conveys an appropriate sense of weirdness in his description:

At noontide yet and in the lonely night Thro’ shadowland the damnéd ground exhales Appalling battle-fumes: black figures rise— The Earthborn dead—to urge their ghostly war. The peasant flees his half-ploughed field unnerved, And cattle come back to the steading mad.[1392]

From the sadness of the Argolic ghosts whom he evokes Teiresias infers an ultimate Theban victory. Bacchus, aiding Thebes, hinders the Argives’ march by a miraculous drought:

It was the hour whereat the panting day (anhela dies) Raiseth the sun high as the mid-world peak, When o’er the gaping fields a sluggard haze (tardus uapor) Broods, and each forest lets the sunlight in.[1393]

And amidst this anguish of the solstice they are guided to the one spring remaining in the land by Hypsipyle, once of Lemnos and now a nurse to a king’s child Opheltes or Archemorus. Suspecting no danger, she leaves the child, in order to show them the water more quickly.

Book V. King Adrastus is desirous of knowing who this benefactress is, and nearly 500 lines are devoted to the fortunes, past and present, of Hypsipyle. She relates the crime of the Lemnian women in murdering their menfolk, the consequences to herself of having surreptitiously saved her father, and the visit of Jason in the Argo. Statius here trespasses on the subject of Valerius Flaccus’s Argonautica; and it may be noted that while in the Thebaid Hypsipyle states that she was forced into a union with Jason, Valerius represents her as attracted into an amour by Jason’s looks.

The child Archemorus has been all this time left unattended, and another digression describes the venomous serpent which attacks him. Cries “like half-completed words in dreams” (qualia non totas peragunt insomnia uoces) are heard, and on her return the errant nurse finds the child dead. Against the furious anger of its father she is protected by the grateful Argives.

Book VI. The epic interest is considerably less in a book concerned first with the building of a funeral pyre and cremation of the child, and then with an elaborate account of the games in its honour—chariot-race, foot-race (“running,” remarks the poet, “is a useful accomplishment in war, if success fails one!”) quoits, boxing and wrestling.

Book VII. Jupiter is vexed that the Argives should delay the war by holding games—and readers may sympathize with Jupiter’s feeling in mid-epic. A further intervention is made by Mars and Bacchus. Eteocles hears of the Argive advance, and there follows a catalogue of the host, as pointed out by old Phorbas to Antigone, sister of the arch-opponents, while they look forth from a tower in Thebes. Jocasta, mother of Polynices, comes forth

In all the mighty majesty of woe (egreditur magna cum maiestate malorum)[1394]

to carry the olive branch (ramum oleae) into her son’s camp and make an appeal for peace. Polynices is touched; but, while he is wavering, Tydeus intervenes, bitterly recalling the treachery to which he had been subjected by Eteocles. The overtures fail: the Fury rouses the old passion for blood: fighting begins. A Theban warrior longs to slay Amphiaraus, counting other victims trivial in comparison. But another doom was appointed for him: Apollo diverts the fatal weapon to his charioteer, and takes the dead driver’s place, spreading death everywhere as the chariot careers on its dread path among bleeding corpses and dying men. Then by a solemn intuition Amphiaraus realizes the presence of Apollo and his own nearness to the brink of the other world:

“Long since, Cirrhaean sire, my quivering car Told me ’twas thou that by my fated team Didst sit (why honour human frailty thus?) How long wilt thou delay th’ approaching ghosts? I hear e’en now the Stygian torrent’s rush, Pluto’s black rivers and the triple bark Of hellish watch-hound. Take my laurel crown, Take now thine honours girt about my head: To carry these to hell were sacrilege. With my last words—if aught of thanks thou ow’st Unto thy prophet passing hence—to thee, Phoebus, I trust a home betrayed, and doom Of wife accurst, and generous wrath of son.” —Down leaped Apollo sad, but hid his tears.[1395]

Then came the mysterious passing, as the ground opened beneath the doomed man:

Sheer yawned the earth below with jaws profound. Dread seized in turn on stars and shadowland. Him did that cavern measureless drink down, Engulfing steeds that made as if to cross. He loosed not grip of weapon or of rein, But, as he was, drove straight for Tartarus, And, ever lower fallen, gazed at heaven, Groaning to see the land close over him, Until a lighter shock conjoined again The parted fields and blocked daylight from Hell.[1396]

Book VIII. Excitement reigns in the lower world over the sudden descent of Amphiaraus; and the querulous utterances of Pluto, almost Lucianesque in their scoffing spirit, have a wholly different ring from the consistent solemnity of Virgil in Aeneid VI. The Argives are inwardly shaken and fall back: so there is joy in Thebes. Adrastus summons a council to choose a successor to the prophet. The battle is renewed on the Theban side by a sally, and a narrative of wounds and death ensues. The daughters of Oedipus, Antigone and Ismene, a pair of contrasting characters (par aliud morum), lament the sorrows of their house with divided sympathies in the conflict:

Both, ways their fears incline: whom would they wish The vanquished, whom the victor in the war? The exile wins their preference unowned. (tacite praeponderat exsul).[1397]

Real pathos marks the end of Ismene’s lover, Atys, the warrior brought home dying, with her name the only word on his chill lips.[1398] Tydeus works havoc among the enemy, and sends whirling through the air helmets with heads inside (galeasque rotat per nubila plenas, 699). He and Melanippus mortally wound each other, and the book closes with the horrible spectacle of Tydeus gnawing the head of his adversary.

Book IX is mainly concerned with the valiancy of two heroes, Hippomedon and the young Arcadian Parthenopaeus, whose parting from his mother Atalanta formed a brief episode in Book IV. Stoutly defending the dead Tydeus, Hippomedon is tempted away by Tisiphone’s lying message that Adrastus is taken prisoner, and on returning discovers that the foe have secured his friend’s body. During Hippomedon’s subsequent deeds of prowess, he is opposed by the River-god Ismenus and is saved from drowning only to succumb on the bank under a rain of darts. Parthenopaeus signalizes himself by feats of archery. He is in the end, at the instigation of Mars, slain by Dryas, who is in turn slain by an invisible hand, deemed to be that of Diana herself. The book concludes with the dying behests of Parthenopaeus.

Book X. Theban troops, inspirited by Eteocles’s harangue, plan to surround the Argives and prevent a retreat; but are themselves overcome by a divinely contrived sleep and surprised by the Argives, who break their lines and do much slaughter. At daybreak a fierce attack is delivered on Thebes, when Creon’s son Menoeceus devotes himself for his city, plunging to death from a rampart-tower. Capaneus, defiantly scaling the town walls, is struck dead by Jupiter’s thunderbolt.

Book XI. Goaded by Tisiphone, Polynices challenges Eteocles to single combat, and the latter, over-persuaded by Creon to face his brother, will not listen to the entreaties of his mother Jocasta. Polynices similarly rejects his sister Antigone’s appeals. Heaven, earth and hell are revolted by this detestably unnatural duel. The horrified Adrastus endeavours in vain to part the brothers and retires to Argos. The agonized intervention of Pietas descending from the skies is foiled by the malignant Fury.

Thus, at last, half-way through the eleventh book, Statius makes the two protagonists meet, with the result that the compression of the last eleven hundred lines produces a much balder effect than that of the more spacious books which precede. Both combatants die, Polynices being mortally wounded, as he stoops to strip his rival. Creon, assuming the crown, decrees that no invader is to be buried. Led by Antigone, Oedipus laments over the bodies of his sons, and meditates suicide, which his daughter prevents. Jocasta stabs herself, and is tended by Ismene. Then Antigone’s intercession obtains a mitigation of Creon’s arrogant sentence of exile launched at Oedipus. The remnants of the invading army disperse to Adrastus’s dominions.

Book XII opens with funeral honours for the Theban dead. A report of Creon’s decree withholding burial from his fallen foes is brought to the wives of the six slain leaders on their way from Argos to recover the bodies of their dead. Except Argia, Polynices’s widow, all the women go to implore aid from Theseus, King of Athens. Argia, arriving outside Thebes, burns the body of her husband on Eteocles’s pyre, where there are signs to show that fratricidal hatred had survived death; she is met and helped by Antigone. The two are detected, haled before Creon, proudly own their act and are sentenced to death. Athens meanwhile consents to help the Argive war-widows. Very significantly the altar of mercy in Athens is described, as a symbolic contrast to the harshness of Creon at Thebes. The passage is remarkable for the colour it gave to the notion of after times that the poet was a Christian:

There stood an altar at the city’s heart Reared to no God of Power: Mercy mild Made it her shrine, and human misery Had hallowed it. It never lacked for prayers Renewed, nor e’er repelled a suppliant. There whoso asks is heard, and day and night The way is open, and the offering The Holy One requireth is a cry. The worship costs but little: incense-flame And victim’s blood find no acceptance there. That altar sweats with tears.[1399]

So the Athenians approach Thebes and win the victory, Creon dying at the hands of Theseus. The obsequies of the fallen and the envoi (already translated) complete the work.

To appreciate an allusive epic like the Thebaid the reader needs equipment in the myths of Thebes: he must know more than the story of Oedipus, the fated king, his house, and the “Seven Against Thebes”: he must remember the outlines of legends about Amphion, about Cadmus, son of Agenor, about Dirce, and he must be expert enough to grasp why Statius calls Thebes by varying epithets like “Aonian” (I. 34), “Echionian” (I. 169, II. 90), “Ogygian” (I. 173, 328, II. 85), or “Sidonian” (III. 656), and why Polynices is the “Ismenian hero” (I. 673), and why the Argives are Inacha pubes (I. 619). The well-springs of all such mythological lore lay far back in the ancient Greek Cyclic story of Thebes; in the tragedies of Aeschylus, Sophocles and Euripides;[1400] and in Statius’s main source for material, Antimachus, who, before the days of the Alexandrian poets, but anticipating their erudition, composed a massive epic in his Thebais. He wrote rather for the leisured and the learned than for the ordinary reader. Alexandrian critics put him second among epic authors: and Hadrian is said to have preferred him to Homer. But he used his spacious limits unrestrained by any canons of unity. Not content to end the forbidding tale of fratricidal strife on the more human, more really tragic note of Antigone’s devotion to her slain brother, he involved himself in two additional sequels, the war with Athens and the revenge of Argos. Statius showed more wisdom in writing fewer books on the theme, in condensing the war with Athens, and in omitting the triumphant return during the next generation of the Argive avengers, the Epigoni. When he is criticized, as he deserves to be, for his digressions, it is fair to remember the almost overpowering literary legacy which he inherited. There are signs that he also consulted Seneca’s Phoenissae and Oedipus; but in Latin his master was Virgil, although Ovid and Lucan[1401] also went to his making. Nor was Horace forgotten.[1402] The Virgilian influence is manifest both in his language and in the construction of his incidents. Sometimes actual phrases are copied as in magnanimosque duces (Th. III. 65); procumbunt piceae (Th. VI. 100, to remind readers, as if by a traditional phrase, that the whole passage is based on the felling of the wood in Aen. VI. 179 sqq.); pede pes (Th. VIII. 399, repeating the Ennian words borrowed by Furius of Antium as well as by Virgil, Aen. X. 361, and in structure going back to Homer himself). The Siluae present the same features in phrases like urbis opus (Silv. II. ii. 31) and qualis eras! (II. vi. 34). Or, again, a different turn may be given to the original expression, as Virgil’s Quis fallere possit amantem? becomes nil transit amantes (Th. II. 335), or his forsan et haec meminisse iuuabit is elaborated into

forsan et has uenturus amor praemiserit iras ut meminisse iuuet. (Th. I. 472-473).

Elsewhere Statius gives us a blend of verbal and material reminiscence, as when he implores his father’s spirit to revisit and counsel him in dreams issuing from “the Gate of Horn” rather than from “The Ivory Gate” (Silv. V. iii. sub fin.; Aen. VI., sub fin.). His debt to Virgil for incident is also heavy—too heavy, in truth, for genuine originality. It was not merely that he took over through Virgil the convention of supernatural interferences, as also of copious decorative similes, and outdid all his predecessors in these: he went further and allowed his imitation to become too obsequious in a parallelism of incidents. Because Evander told the story of Hercules and Cacus in the Aeneid, we must, before the first book of the Thebaid is completed, have Adrastus’s digressive tale about Coroebus’s resolve to rid his country of a punitive monster sent by Apollo; because there were funeral games in Virgil, we must have almost a whole book devoted to the rites and contests in memory of the child Archemorus; and because Aeneid IX celebrated the bold night-raid by Nisus and Euryalus, we must have a corresponding pair, Hopleus and Dymas, in the tenth book of the Thebaid, intercepted during their quest for the bodies of Tydeus and Parthenopaeus.

The other epic effort by Statius was his Achilleid, cut short by death when little over 1100 lines were written. What dimensions this tale of Troy might have reached we can only guess: it certainly was to cover a wider field than a “Wrath of Achilles”; for the author, immediately after his invocation, declares that his design is to relate more than the Iliad contains—not to end with the fate of Hector, as Homer did, but to escort the young hero throughout the Trojan war.[1403] This then, is a second laurel wreath which he asks Apollo to plait for him, inasmuch as he announces himself no stranger to the Muses but known for his poem on Thebes.[1404] True to his more extended view of Achilles’s life, Statius begins early in it with the fears of the hero’s mother Thetis that danger threatens her son from the elopement of Helen with Paris. So, with the purpose of transferring Achilles to a safe hiding-place, she visits the cave of the Centaur Chiron under Mount Pelion where the youth is being brought up. Her son is absent: Chiron tells his mother he has remarked a change in him:

Once he was wont to bear rebuke and hear Commands with zeal, nor far desert the cave; Now Ossa holds him not; nor Pelion’s Towering mass, nor snows of Thessaly.

Just at that moment, radiant after an adventure on which he has killed a lioness, he returns,

Yet, spite of war and toilsome energy, Comely to look upon: there floated o’er Fair lineaments a rosy fire: his hair Outshone the gleam of yellow gold, and time Had not yet changed his earliest youthful down. Eyes with a quiet flash were his, and you Could see his mother written on his face.

She decides that he must be concealed in the island of Scyros, and a pleasant picture of mingled nature and fancy is given us of his half-miraculous transference thither. Achilles, sunk in the profound sleep that falls on the young (qui pueris sopor), is borne by his goddess-mother down to the quiet seashore (iussa tacere litora). The way lies clear in a moonlit world. Their escort, the Centaur, seeks to hide his moist eyes (udaque celat lumina), when suddenly a dolphin team hurries mother and son off across the waters, and he can with effort (erecto prospectat equo!) just see them pass from sight where the white foam lingers behind their course. Then gloom descends on Thessaly; for the heights of Pholoë lament the youth that will never return, and cloud-capt Othrys sighs, and the river Spercheos wastes with pining—a frigid sort of “pathetic fallacy” like the legendary sorrow of nature for Balder dead. It is a more natural touch to say that the cave where the old Centaur taught Achilles music is now mute, or even to fancy that the woodland Fauns miss his boyish melodies, but the grotesque is reached in the mourning of the nymphs for the lost opportunity of marrying Achilles! This and the too matter-of-fact reference to the Centaur on his hind legs (erecto equo) are among the not infrequent instances where mythology betrayed Statius into absurdity. Nearly all the rest of the existing fragment, which might borrow Mr. Robert Bridges’ title “Achilles in Scyros,” relates his reception in women’s attire at court there, his passion for one of the princesses, the detection of his disguise by Ulysses, and his departure for Troy.

The Achilleid has much the same qualities as the Thebaid. There are still echoes of Virgil, mythological erudition, and ornamental similes. The subject, however, is a more attractive one than that of the Thebaid, and it is unfortunate that the incompleteness of the Achilleid makes elaborate comparison between them nugatory.

Probably Statius and his contemporaries felt that his fame would be founded on his epic work, and it was for his Thebaid that he was valued in the Middle Ages. In Dante he plays an elevated part, and is often quoted. Chaucer, who mentions him with enthusiasm several times, calls him “Stace of Thebes” in The Knightes Tale, and in the Hous of Fame, repeating Dante’s confusion[1405] of him with a rhetorician of Toulouse,

The Tholosan that highte Stace, That bar of Thebes up the fame Upon his shuldres, and the name Also of cruel Achilles.

Here, then, as in Troilus and Criseyde, where he tells his “litel book” to go

And kis the steppes, whereas thou seest pace Virgile, Ovyde, Omer, Lucan and Stace,

it is among the great narrative poets that Chaucer places Statius. His hold upon the Middle Ages[1406] is not altogether easy to explain. Was it the tradition that he became a Christian which threw a halo round him in the eyes of medieval Catholicism, and did that tradition in turn grow out of his worshipful attitude to Virgil and the tenderness of feeling which found one of its most remarkable expressions in his description of the Shrine of Mercy at Athens? Modern criticism, however, is not likely to forget that he was also the author of the miscellaneous Siluae, which after centuries of oblivion were restored to notice, when Poggio on his travels in 1417 or 1418 found them in a manuscript along with Manilius and Silius and had a copy made to be sent back to Italy.[1407]

The thirty-two poems in the five books of the miscellany entitled the Siluae are mostly in hexameter verse, though there are four in hendecasyllables[1408] and one set each of Alcaics and Sapphics.[1409] The number of lines in each book is between 700 and 800. In the fifth book, the longest poem of all, 293 lines on the poet’s father, is in juxtaposition to the shortest, the 19 lines to Sleep. The variety of the poems is the outcome of their origin: they fit some passing event; pay a compliment to the emperor or a friend; describe a country house or work of art; frame an elegy on the poet’s father, a slave, a lion or a parrot; indite an invocation to Sleep; or celebrate the dead poet Lucan’s birthday. In other words, they are occasional verses, being, the author tells us in one of his five prefaces,[1410] rapidly composed, so that they illustrate Quintilian’s description of what is meant by a silua in literature.[1411] Statius had long hesitated about issuing in collected form poems which were composed separately, but considered that the author of the Thebaid might be pardoned for this venture, on the analogy of great poets who wrote light verses as Virgil did the Culex.[1412] All students of the archaeology and social history of the Flavian age have reason to applaud the poet’s decision to give them to the world; and as literature there is nothing quite like them in Latin. They are not to be judged as claiming high inspiration, but as pieces in which the recurrent artificiality is time after time illuminated by the play of a pretty fancy and the grace of clever expression. Nor is the artificiality wholly inconsistent with sincerity of feeling. A survey of the poems may illustrate their qualities.

Book I. Statius is not at his best in the opening poem, on the equestrian statue of Domitian, where he strikes an exaggerated note in suggesting that the work has come down complete from heaven, that the rider is a greater than Julius, and that the burden of divinity makes Earth pant beneath the statue. The long epithalamium which follows, on Stella’s marriage to Violentilla, who was a Neapolitan like Statius, is pleasanter, though modern taste wearies of its Venus, Cupids, Apollo and Bacchus. More concrete and engaging is the third poem, on a visit to Vopiscus’s cool retreat at Tivoli where the natural beauty of the scenery makes a genuine impression on the poet,[1413] and compensates for the attendant artificialities. Then the recovery of Rutilius Gallicus is celebrated in polished lines, which, however they suited the first century, read rather frigidly when they introduce a rescue by Apollo and Aesculapius. Statius holds us more in describing his friend’s considerate conduct as a judge[1414] and his premature breakdown owing to the strain of official duty. The lines appear to argue in their author maturity of years, and bear on the question of his birth-date: to him in this poem sixty is not old age:

’Twas not the fault of years (for they had scarce O’ertaken twice six lustres) but the toil Incessant and the vigorous mind’s control Over the body, all the watchful care For his own emperor—a task beloved. So stole upon the core of that tired frame Ensnaring ease, slow disregard of life.[1415]

In the fifth poem his sportive theme is the decoration of Claudius Etruscus’s baths and his task to celebrate not Greek springs but the Latin waters of the aqueducts Virgo and Marcia. Having struck this Roman note, however, he returns to Greek mythology: it is our Lady of Cythera, Venus and her husband, the Fire-God, who with the aid of the Loves’ torches are responsible for heating the bath furnaces! Everything there is costly (nil ibi plebeium); for Statius had aristocratic tastes: the water is fit to be Cytherea’s birthplace, Narcissus’s mirror, Diana’s bath! And after these mythological conceits comes the prosaic assurance that not even a visitor from the seaside would despise those bathing facilities.[1416] The book closes with the praises of the emperor’s carnival, memorable for a fair-weather rain of delicacies and fruits, a lavish bounty surpassing the Golden Age, Domitian’s condescension in sharing the feast, spectacular features like women combatants and dwarf warriors, and the cosmopolitan crowd at the theatre—buxom Lydian damsels clapping their hands, the jingling musicians of Cadiz, noisy Syrians, and those who barter common sulphur for broken glass.

The consolatory poem sent to Melior on the death of a slave-boy adopted by him has touches of real feeling, and is less overloaded with mythology. Closeness of blood, he argues in excuse for the adoptive father’s frantic grief, does not always make the strongest tie:

Sons we beget perforce—adopt at will.[1417]

But there is comfort in regarding death as freedom from anxiety:

We all must go, must go; and Aeacus Shaketh the urn amid the boundless shades (umbris, v. l. ulnis). Yet he we mourn is happy in th’ escape From men and gods and hazards unforeseen And life’s dark instability; for him Fate may not touch. He never asked nor feared Nor yet deserved (meruit, v.l. renuit) to die; but we, a crowd Distressed and wretched, know not whence may come Our final day or what shall end our time.[1418]

The poem on the mansion of Pollius and Polla at Sorrento shows how the effects of nature and of art compete in the poet’s mind. To adjudicate between the charms of a crescent bay outside and the architectural amenities of the villa itself is embarrassing.[1419] Characteristically he divides his praises among aesthetic treasures and the view from different rooms, with his eye now on Naples in the distance, now on the variety of marbles around him. He draws from nature in his picture of the seaside villa in the gloaming,

When day is wearied and the shadow falls Upon the water from the hill at dusk, And mirrored mansions float upon the bay;[1420]

or he indulges in a purely fanciful picture:

Oft when the grape is ripe with autumn-down, A sea-nymph climbs the cliff, who, canopied ’Neath the dark night, with full-grown tendril clears Of brine her dripping eyes, and from the slopes Snatches the clusters sweet. The spindrift oft Splashes the vintage from the neighbouring waves. The Satyrs seaward dive and ’mid the surf The Hill-gods long to seize the naked nymph.[1421]

Three short pieces follow, each touching on a possession of Atedius Melior—his plane-tree by the garden pool concerning which Statius daintily relates the legend of a nymph’s escape from Pan; his parrot for whose sudden death a train of mourning birds is invited to chaunt a dirge; and his tame lion slain in the amphitheatre to the just indignation of his fellow-lions, but with the consolation of having roused the emotion of people, senate and emperor! Of the dead slave of Flavius Ursus, commemorated in the next poem, he affirms that his fine qualities of soul justify the free display of grief which Statius in such consolations takes pains to emphasize. The book closes with the Genethliacon Lucani, whose neat hendecasyllabics congratulate Spain, land of the west, on its gift of Lucan to the world, and extravagantly claim that Homer and Virgil are outrivalled by him. But we are grateful for the light thrown by the Muse’s prophecy on the subjects of Lucan’s writings. Nor are the exclamatory lines on a young life cut short unnatural:

Ah! Fates too cruel and severe! Ah! Brief the span of high career! Why round the peak must perils rage? Why may not greatness reach old age?[1422]

Book III opens with a record of the dedication of a temple to Hercules by Pollius Felix at Sorrento on a spot where the old narrow shrine once gave shelter to a picnic party surprised on a hot summer day by tempest. The poet thinks the spacious building has improved what was

A barren sandy shore but yesterday, A hillside which the sea-foam splashed upon, Cliffs rough with brier, ground that foothold grudged.[1423]

The second piece is a send-off (propempticon) to the author’s patron Maecius Celer about to sail for Egypt, where, the poem reminds us, the grain ships come from. Echoing Horace, Statius says his patron takes with him the better half of his soul (animae partem ... maiorem), and he dwells on the pain of parting. The gradually disappearing vessel is pictured:

The barque speeds o’er the wandering tides in flight, Faint by degrees, defeating eyes that strain Afar, and clasps within its slender boards Legions of fears.[1424]

His self-recrimination over failure to go abroad with his patron scarcely rings true, especially when supported with mythological instances; but the imagined reunion on the traveller’s return and the anticipation of the story of intervening years make a natural conclusion. The third poem is another consolation: it is addressed to Claudius Etruscus on his father’s death. The poet too, he says, had mourned a father.[1425] The dead Etruscus, though of servile origin, was ennobled by service, and obedience is a law of nature. The sketch of his career is interesting. Freed by Tiberius, he attended Caligula as a keeper might a wild beast; he had high responsibilities under Claudius and Nero; and his preferment in the civil service to the treasury was a tribute to his ability in dealing with estimates. All this is cleverly told in well-turned verses; and a pleasant account is given of his married life. Unfortunately, artificiality is not absent. The conceit of fluttering Cupids dropping wing-feathers on a funeral pyre or supplying discarded arrow-cases to make fuel for the cremation is supremely ridiculous; and when the grief of Etruscus for the loss of his father is compared with the grief of Theseus in like case, we feel the mythological parallel detracts from the simplicity befitting a deep sorrow. The fourth poem, one of the least pleasing, turns on the dedication to Aesculapius of the locks of Earinus, one of the emperor’s eunuchs. The fifth, on the other hand, has charm in its playful remonstrance with his wife on her alleged reluctance to accompany her husband when he has decided to quit Rome for the Bay of Naples. Could she refuse, after sharing loyally his hours of triumph and defeat, after full knowledge of his literary toil on the Thebaid, after nursing him back from the point of death? Facetiously he assures her that her daughter can find suitors elsewhere than in Rome: the district of his choice has not been completely devastated by the fires of Vesuvius! This home to which he invites her is “his own, his native land” (natale solum), blest with temperate climate and with peace. He ends this persiflage with a reminder of the legendary and literary associations of the Bay of Naples.

The first three poems of Book IV are overburdened with the praises of Domitian, and celebrate respectively his Majesty’s seventeenth consulship, his hospitality in the banqueting-hall, and his greatness as a road-maker. There follows a poetical epistle counselling a busy friend to take a holiday:

Timely repose incites and nurtures strength, And manhood after rest grows manlier.[1426]

The one Alcaic lyric of the Siluae is a spring-ode to Septimius Severus, a native of North Africa. After it stands the hexametric poem which proves the value attached by Statius to the literary and artistic accompaniments of a dinner-party. Then Sapphics are addressed to Vibius Maximus abroad:

When will sweet Latium once more welcome you From the Dalmatian hills, where, having sought In hell, the miner comes back pale, in hue Like gold up-brought.[1427]

But there is a child at home to greet Vibius: let the child learn from his father the historical skill wherewith he traces the antiquity of the world, recalling the style of terse Sallust and of “the nurseling of Timavus” (Livy). The eighth poem conveys congratulations to Julius Menecrates on the birth of a third child, so that, as the poet is quick to point out, the emperor’s previous concession of the ius trium liberorum had merely anticipated Lucina’s actual gift. The final piece, addressed in a bantering spirit to a friend on his return-present of a mouldy old book, submits a humorous list of possible cheap things to give away.

Book V begins with the commemorative poem consoling Abascantus in his continued grief over the loss of his wife Priscilla, a dear friend of Statius’s wife. Their loyal union is beautifully drawn and makes one of several engaging pictures in Statius of married happiness. Priscilla felt rapturous joy over her husband’s attainment to high office in the state, but the raptures did not turn her head:

Luck never sapped thy calm: thine honest heart Swelled not with bliss, but kept the even way. High fortune left thee modest as before.[1428]

She attended to her careworn husband’s wants with the regularity, solicitude, and simplicity to be found in a rural home:

As thrifty husbandman’s Apulian wife Or house-dame sun-browned in the Sabine glare, Knows, when the stars peep out, the hour has come That ends his work, and plies her bustling toil O’er bed and board, and hearkens for the sound Of the returning plough.[1429]

The doom that assailed this favoured home is the prevailing theme in the second half of the poem. The succeeding piece is on a youth of sixteen, Crispinus, going out to face the work of the world, with the inspiring memory of a father’s distinguished services. The next, a long “In Memoriam” on Statius’s own father, has been extensively drawn upon in connexion with his life. Like prose Consolationes, such an epicedion shows conventional features in structure and thought. It is followed by the briefest and most poetic of the Siluae. Dr. Mackail says, “one might almost call it a sonnet,”[1430] and, if certain mythological lines are dropped, it can be reduced to the requisite proportions:

What crime, O Sleep, thou God of calm confessed Brings my young heart alone to lack thy boon? Wild things of earth or air in slumber swoon: The tree-tops droop the head in mimic rest: Loud streams are hushed: the rough sea smooths his breast: Fierce waves find peace upon the strand full soon. But stars of eve and seventh returning moon Behold me ever in pale woe depressed.

Dawn passing leaves me in her ruth bedewed: E’en now some lover, clasping hand in hand His love by night, repels thee, Sleep, with zeal. Leave him—not on my eyes full-winged to brood, As joy might crave. Nay, touch me with thy wand: Enough if, o’er me poised, thou lightly steal.[1431]

In the final poem of the miscellany is a lament on the death of the poet’s adopted son which marks the tenderness of his heart. “I,” he says, “who once could offer balm to the bereaved now crave the healing hand: and who art thou that censurest my lament?”

Better detain the flood that breaks its bank, Or counter ravening flame than try to bar A broken heart from grief.[1432]

There are some books—and shall we not include the Siluae or still more the Thebaid?—of which the reader feels that it were best not too earnestly to plod through them, but when one chances upon the wearisome to leave it as one found it, perhaps preferring my Lord of Montaigne’s method “of running over by divers glances, sodaine glimpses and reiterated reprisings.” To come from a simple and direct kind of poetry to Statius is like passing out of the open breeze into a conservatory of flowers, where many are beautiful but many raise the conviction that they are forced. He had inherited the Alexandrian and Catullian fondness for picture-drawing; and it is a natural result that descriptions emanating from an art-admirer like Statius should be influenced by his recollection of paintings and statues. At the same time this influence removed him one degree further from nature and led to that over-elaboration, which, by leaving little to the reader’s imagination, loses the charm of vague suggestiveness.[1433] It is a learned and allusive style, apt to be far-fetched in fancy and excessive in eulogy. The Siluae, in particular, have the elegance of the eighteenth century. They imply a cultured leisure fertile in refined improvisations. The elegance bears a resemblance to that of Pope and Thomson, and the scenery to that of Watteau’s Fêtes Champêtres. Some of the missives have a tone that would have suited the boudoir of a French marquise or the library of a noble patron of letters in the time of Queen Anne or the early Georges. Nor is it surprising that the Thebaid should have made an appeal, if only a transient one, to Gray, whose works contain a fragment of his early translation into heroic couplets of part of its sixth book.

Statius’s artificiality is largely apparent in his enslavement to an unreal mythology, but partly also in his liking for literary conceits, which may or may not be mythological. Modern readers are mildly amused at the feather-dropping Cupids (Silv. III. iii.), or at Leander’s fire of love fit to warm the sea but not equal to Stella’s love for Violentilla (I. ii.), or at the descent from the sky of Domitian’s celestial kindred to embrace his equestrian statue:

Thus one neck shall find room for all the stars! (I. i. 98).

In great part the artificiality was traditional. Thus, when Statius addresses elegiac poets as “Ye who defraud the renowned verse of its final stride,” he is intentionally aping Ovid’s conceit of making Cupid responsible for the change of the heroic hexameter to the pentameter.[1434] Often the attempt to make a myth realistic merely succeeds (as with Lucan) in achieving the grotesque: e.g. when the ghost of Laius mortally wounded years before is imagined to drop blood on the sleeping Eteocles in Thebaid II, or when the deaths of Niobe’s fourteen children is arithmetically related to the seven gates of Thebes:

Two funerals thronged each massive city-gate.[1435]

Sometimes the artificiality lies more in the phrasing. It is fairly obvious that “the bridler of fiery footed steeds”[1436] must be the Sun-god; that, if Hercules is “soaked plentifully with his brother,” the reference is to the grape juice of Bacchus;[1437] and that, when in years a boy “equalled the sum of Hercules’s labours,” he ought to be twelve.[1438] Rather more remote is the epithet “Ledaean” applied to a swan-plume because of Jove’s amour with Leda, or the author’s mode of suggesting that a cool mansion is free from the scorching summer sun of the Olympic games:

The house seethes not with heat of Pisa’s year.[1439]

Again, the artificiality may depend on no allusion, but on a curiously strained form of expression. “He slants (obliquat) his entreaties” is used of entreaties addressed to bystanders; “they hold exchange of breasts” means embracing; “she reduced the glades to peace with her horn” means that Atalanta, when hunting, killed the wild beasts therein; and “the liquid fodder of eastern mid-winter” is a Statian expression for rains that feed the Nile.[1440] It is easy to laugh at such lapses from the straightforward and to complain of Statius’s artificiality and prolixity: it is easier still, and perhaps commoner, to decry him without reading him. But neither carping nor neglect is the right attitude towards a great influence in literature. More profit is derivable from remembering that he can show, as an epic writer, vigour in narrative and speech, and, as an occasional poet, a real taste for landscape and colour,[1441] besides letting his fancy at times go free. Nor should strained compliments, strained consolations, strained mythology wholly obliterate that depth of affection which is nowhere more manifest than in the last book of the Siluae.

If he is more Virgilian than Lucan, Statius is less obtrusively rhetorical. There is less of the sententia, less epigram, less antithesis, and more of a quiet scholarly elaboration of the traditional epic manner. Thus it is rarer to find in him than in Lucan semi-proverbial phrases of a quotable cast, like “Panic believes everything” (nil falsum trepidis, Th. VII. 131), or “Hope deferred maketh the heart sick” (spes anxia mentem extrahit et longo consumit gaudia uoto, Th. I. 322: cf. II. 320-321). His elaboration tends to war against pithiness, but some phrases and lines are readily recalled: e.g. Cur oculis sordet uicina uoluptas? (Silv. I. iii. 98, virtually “why does distance lend enchantment to the view?”); calcabam necopinus opes (Silv. I. iii. 53, “I trod on wealth and knew it not”) of a rich mosaic floor; or, from the simile of Pluto’s entrance upon his sovereignty over the lower world, words that would fit Milton’s Satan, palluit amisso ueniens in Tartara caelo (Th. XI. 446, “blenched as he came to Hell when Heaven was lost.”).

What we must expect in a style so elaborate is an avoidance of the more simple and concrete modes of expressing ideas and a preference for abstractions, personifications, metaphors, as well as erudition. The lion that, even when mortally wounded, dies fighting to the last is referred to in these abstract terms: “as he fell, his valour returns from the midst of death and not at once did all his threats present their backs,” i.e. turn to flight.[1442] Statius makes great use of compound adjectives (e.g. uuifer, oliuifer, rorifer, laborifer, fumifer, flammiger, saetiger, noctiuagus, montiuagus, fluctiuagus, anguicomus), also of one of the traditional decorations in epic—the simile. There are well over thirty similes in Thebaid, Book VI, in connexion with the games, and well over twenty in many of the other books. They are elaborated often to the extent of six lines, sometimes to eight, and show considerable variety. Many that illustrate violent action introduce such animals as lions, tigresses, wolves, bears, boars, bulls; others picture birds in flight like cranes, or twittering like swallows: a snowstorm, a hunter, a passing ship, a ruined nest, a Spanish gold miner underground, an avalanche (which the old Delphin edition illustrates from Rhaetia), or a cow grieving for a lost calf (a passage that recalls a similar situation in Lucretius). King Adrastus is likened to a victorious bull, and Hippomedon to a Centaur; runners are compared cumulatively to race-horses, arrows, and stags escaping from a lion; and a falling quoit to the moon brought down from heaven by magic.

The hexameters of Statius exhibit less monotony than do those of Ovid, Lucan or Valerius Flaccus. He secures this greater variety by dexterity in the use of pauses. His metrical movements are composed with skill, and often are felicitously appropriate to the sense, as in the passage on Night and Sleep in Thebaid I, where he brings into juxtaposition a line with five spondees and one with five dactyls, then has a quick line of four dactyls, returns to a slow movement of five spondees, and closes on one where the feet are exactly balanced:

Titanis late, mundo subuecta silenti, Rorifera gelidum tenuauerat aera biga; Iam pecudes uolucresque tacent, iam Somnus amaris Inrepsit curis pronusque ex aethere nutat Grata laboratae referens obliuia uitae.

Computations[1443] have been made which show that, while Statius is more dactylic than Virgil, he is less so than Ovid and Valerius. He has fewer elisions than Virgil. Altogether his line falls short of supreme epic dignity. In the Siluae his hendecasyllabics, unlike Catullus’s but like Martial’s, regularly begin with a spondee. His two imitations of Horatian lyric metres display small inspiration. But in the Siluae his hexameters appear to most advantage, attaining a facility suitable to the lighter and more sportive subjects in the collection. Here, then, Statius is in matter and form most truly himself. He portrays in the main the surface of life, and is acquainted with its amenities and even its pathos; but he does not penetrate into its meaning.

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