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.