But though in these respects Valerius has improved on his predecessor, and though his work lacks the arid wastes of his model, he is yet an author of an inferior class, and comes ill out of the comparison. For he has little of the rich, almost oriental, colouring of Apollonius at his best, lacks his fire and passion, and fails to cast the same glamour of romance about his subject. While the Dido and Aeneas of Vergil are in some respects but a pale reflection of the Medea and Jason of Apollonius, the loves of Jason and Medea in Valerius are fainter still. His heroine is not the tragic figure that stands out in lines of fire from the pages of Apollonius. His lovers' speeches have a certain beauty and tenderness of their own, but they lack the haunting melody and the resistless passion that make the Rhodian's lines immortal. And while to a great extent he lacks the peculiar merits of the Greek,[491] he possesses his most serious blemish, the blemish that is so salient a characteristic of both Alexandrian and Silver Latin literature, the passion for obscure learning. A good example is the huge, though most ingenious, catalogue of the tribes of Scythia at the opening of the sixth book, with its detailed inventory of strange names and customs, and its minute descriptions of barbaric armour. His love of learning lands him, moreover, in strange anachronisms. We are told that the Colchians are descended from Sesostris;[492] the town of Arsinoe is spoken of as already in existence; Egypt is already connected with the house of Lagus.[493] In addition, Valerius possesses many of the faults from which Apollonius is free, but with which the post-Augustan age abounds. The dangerous influence of Seneca has, it is true, decayed; we are no longer flooded with epigram or declamatory rhetoric. Rhetoric there is, and rhetoric that is not always effective;[494] but it is rather a perversion of the rhetoric of Vergil than the descendant of the brilliant rant of Lucan and Seneca. From the gross lack of taste and humour that characterizes so many of his contemporaries he is comparatively free, though his description of the historic 'crab' caught by Hercules reaches the utmost limit of absurdity: laetus et ipse Alcides: Quisnam hos vocat in certamina fluctus? dixit, et, intortis adsurgens arduus undis, percussit subito deceptum fragmine pectus, atque in terga ruens Talaum fortemque Eribotem et longe tantae securum Amphiona molis obruit, inque tuo posuit caput, Iphite, transtro. (iii. 474-80.) Alcides gladdened in his heart and cried: 'Who challenges these waves to combat?' and as he rose against those buffeting waves, sudden with broken oar he smote his baffled breast, and, falling headlong back, o'erthrows Talaus and brave Eribotes and far-off Amphion, that never feared so vast a bulk should fall on him, and laid his head against thy thwart, O Iphitus.