Not only do the words of Quintilian (l.c.) suggest a poet who left a great work unfinished, but the poem itself is full of harshnesses and inconsistencies of a kind which so slow and careful a craftsman would assuredly have removed had the poem been completed and received its final revision.[482] These blemishes leave us little room for doubt. The poem that has come down to us is a fragment lacking the _limae labor_. Like the _Thebais_ of Statius and the _Aeneid_ itself, the work was probably planned to fill twelve books. The poem breaks off with the marriage of Medea and Jason on the Isle of Peuce at the mouth of the Danube, where they are overtaken by Medea's brother Absyrtus, who has come in anger to reclaim his sister and take vengeance on the stranger who has beguiled her. It is clear that the Argonauts[483] were, as in Apollonius Rhodius, to escape up the Danube and reach another sea. In Apollonius they descended from the head waters of the Danube by some mythical river to the Adriatic; it is in the Adriatic that Absyrtus is encountered and slain; it is in Phaeacia that Jason and Medea are married. In Valerius both these incidents take place in the Isle of Peuce, at the Danube's mouth. The inference is that Valerius contemplated a different scheme for his conclusion. It has been pointed out[484] that a mere 'reproduction of Apollonius' episodes could not have occupied four books'; and it is suggested that Valerius definitely brought his heroes into relation to the various Italian places[485] connected with the Argonautic legend, while he may even, as a compliment to Vespasian,[486] have brought them back 'by way of the North Sea past Britain and Gaul'. This ingenious conjectural reconstruction has some probability, slight as is the evidence on which it rests. Valerius was almost bound to give his epic a Roman tinge. More convincing, however, is the suggestion of the same critic[487] that the poem was designed to exceed the scope of the epic of Apollonius and to have included the death of Pelias, the malignant and usurping uncle, who, to get rid of Jason, compels him to the search of the golden fleece. To the retribution that came upon him there are two clear references[488] and only the design to describe it could justify the introduction of the suicide of Jason's parents at the outset of the first book, a suicide to which they are driven to avoid death at the hands of Pelias.