Lo! Jocasta, her white hair streaming unkempt over her wild eyes, her cheeks all pale, her arms bruised by the beating of her anguished hands, bearing an olive-branch hung with black wool, came forth from the gates in semblance like to the eldest of the Eumenides, in all the majesty of her many sorrows.
In this last line we have one of the very few lines in Statius that attain to real grandeur. In the lack of such lines, and in the lack of real breadth of treatment lies Statius' chief defect as a narrator. All that dexterity can do he does; but he lacks the supreme gifts, the selective eye and the penetrating imagination of the great poet.
Of his actual diction and ornament little need be said. Without being precisely straightforward, he is not, as a rule, obscure. But his language gradually produces a feeling of oppression. He can be read in short passages without this feeling; the moment, however, the reader takes his verse in considerable quantities, the continued, though only slight, over-elaboration of the work produces a feeling of strain. Throughout there runs a vein of artificiality which ultimately gives the impression of insincerity. He can turn out phrases of the utmost nicety. Nothing can be more neatly turned than the description of the feelings of Antigone and Ismene on the outbreak of the war (viii. 614):
nutat utroque timor, quemnam hoc certamine victum, quem vicisse velint: tacite praeponderat exsul;
Their fears incline this way and that: whom would they have the conqueror in the strife, whom the vanquished? All unconfessed the exile has their prayers.
or than the line describing the parting of the Lemnian women from the Argonauts, their second husbands (v. 478):
heu iterum gemitus, iterumque novissima nox est.
Alas! once more the hour of lamentation is near, once more is come the last night of wedded sleep.
But this neatness often degenerates into preciosity, bellator campus means a field suitable for battle (viii. 377). Nisus, the king of Megara, with the talismanic purple lock, becomes a senex purpureus (i. 334); an embrace is described by the words alterna pectora mutant (v. 722); a woman nearing her time is one iustos cuius pulsantia menses vota tument (v. 115). We have already noted a similar tendency in Valerius Flaccus; such phrase-making is not a badge of any one poet, it is a sign of the times. In the case of Statius there is perhaps less obscurity and less positive extravagance than in any of his contemporaries, but whether as regards description or phrase-making, there is always a suspicion of his work being pitched—if the phrase is permissible—a tone too high. This is, perhaps, particularly noticeable in his similes. They are very numerous, and he has obviously expended great trouble over them. But, with very few exceptions, they are failures. The cause lies mainly in their lack of variety. There are, for instance, no less than sixteen similes drawn from bulls, twelve from lions, six from tigers.[568] None of these similes show any close observance of nature, and in any case the poetic interest of bulls, lions, and tigers is far from inexhaustible. It is less reprehensible that twenty similes should be drawn from storms, which have a more cogent interest and greater picturesque value. But even here Statius has overshot the mark. This lack of variety testifies to a real dearth of poetic imagination, and this failing is noticeable also in the execution. There is rarely a simile containing anything that awakens either imagination, emotion, or thought. Still, to give Statius his due, there are exceptions, such as the simile comparing Parthenopaeus, seen in all his beauty among his comrades, to the reflections of the evening star outshining the reflections of the lesser stars in the waveless sea (vi. 578):
sic ubi tranquillo perlucent sidera ponto vibraturque fretis caeli stellantis imago, omnia clara nitent, sed clarior omnia supra Hesperus exsertat radios, quantusque per altum aethera, caeruleis tantus monstratur in undis.