Medea, on the other hand, is shown in a less favourable light. In the Greek poet she has for excuse the desire to save her sister from the loss of her sons, which gives her half a right to love Jason. In the Latin epic she is without excuse, unless, indeed, the hackneyed supernatural machinery,[490] put in motion to win her for Jason, can be called an excuse. This crude employment of the supernatural leaves Valerius small room for the subtle psychological analysis wherein the Greek excels, and this, coupled with the love of the Silver Age for art magic, tends to make Medea--as in Seneca--a sorceress first, a woman after. In Apollonius she is barbaric, unsophisticated, a child of nature; in Valerius she is a figure of the stage, not without beauty and pathos, but essentially melodramatic. But Apollonius had concentrated all his powers upon Medea, and dwarfs all his other characters, Jason not excepted. It is Medea alone that holds our interests. The little company of heroes embarked on unsailed seas and beset with strange peril are scarcely more than a string of names, that drop in and out, as though the work were a ship's log rather than an epic. In Valerius, though he attempts no detailed portraiture, they are men who can at least fight and die. He has, in a word, a better general conception as to how the story should be told; he is less perfunctory, and strives to fill in his canvas more evenly, whereas Apollonius, although by no means concise, leaves much of his canvas covered by sketches of the slightest and most insignificant character. In the Greek poem, though half the work is consumed in describing the voyage to Colchis, the first two books contain scarcely anything of real poetic interest, if we except the story of Phineus and the Harpies, a few splendid similes, and two or three descriptive passages, as brief as they are brilliant. In Valerius, on the contrary, there is abundance of stirring scenes and rich descriptive passages before the Argonauts reach their goal. His superiority is particularly noticeable at the outset of the poem. Apollonius plunges _in medias res_ and fails to give an adequate account of the preliminaries of the expedition. He has no better method of introducing us to his heroes than by giving us a dreary catalogue of their names. Valerius, too, has his catalogue, but later; we are not choked with indigestible and unpalatable fare at the very opening of the feast. And though both authors take five hundred lines to get their heroes under way, Valerius tells us far more and in far better language; Apollonius does not find his stride till the second book, and forgets that it is necessary to interest the reader in his characters from the very beginning.