All this lacks the force and passion of the corresponding scene in Apollonius. This Medea could never have cried, 'I am no Greek princess, gentle-souled,'[515] nor have prayed that a voice from far away or a warning bird might reach him in Iolcus on the day when he forgot her, or that the stormwind might bear her with reproaches in her eyes to stand by his hearth-stone and chide him for his forgetfulness and ingratitude. The Medea of Apollonius has been softened and sentimentalized by the Roman poet. Valerius knows no device to clothe her with power, save by the narration of her magic arts (vii. 463-71; viii. 68-91). Yet she has a charm of her own; and it needed true poetic feeling to draw even the Medea of Valerius Flaccus. In no age would Valerius have been a great poet, but under happier circumstances he would have produced work that would have ranked high among literary epics. As it is, there is no immeasurable distance between the _Argonautica_ and works such as the _Gerusalemme liberata_, or much of _The Idylls of the King_. He is a genuine poet whose genius was warped by the spirit of the age, stunted by the inherent difficulties besetting the Roman writer of epic, overweighted by his admiration of his two great predecessors, Ovid and Vergil. He is obscure, he is full of echoes, he staggers beneath a burden of useless learning, he overcrowds his canvas and strives in vain to put the breath of life into bones long dry; in addition, his epic suffers from the lack of the reviser's hand. And yet, in spite of all, his characters are sometimes more than lay-figures, and his scenes more than mere stage-painting. He has the divine fire, and it does not always burn dim. Others have greater cunning of hand, greater force of intellect, and have won a higher place in the hierarchy of poets. He--though, like them, he lacks the 'fine madness that truly should possess a poet's brain'--yet gives us much that they cannot give, and sees much that they cannot see. With Quintilian, though with altered meaning, we too may say _multum in Valerio Flacco amisimus_. CHAPTER IX STATIUS Our information as to the life of P. Papinius Statius is drawn almost exclusively from his minor poems entitled the _Silvae_. He was born at Naples, his father was a native of Velia, came of good family,[516] and by profession was poet and schoolmaster. The father's school was at Naples,[517] and, if we may trust his son, was thronged with pupils from the whole of Southern Italy.[518] He had been victorious in many poetic contests both in Naples and in Greece.[519] He had written a poem on the burning of the Capitol in 69 A.D., had planned another on the eruption of Vesuvius in 79 A.D., but apparently died with the work unfinished.[520] It was to his father that our poet attributed all his success as a poet. It was to him he owed both education and inspiration, as the _Epicedion in patrem_ bears pathetic witness (v. 3. 213):