The precedent of Antimachus proved fatal to Statius. He did not, it is true, run to such prolixity as his Greek predecessor; he eliminated the legend of the Epigoni altogether, only alluding to it once in vague and general terms; he succeeded in getting the story, down to the burial of the Argive dead, within the compass of twelve books of not inordinate length. But it is possible to be prolix without being an Antimachus, and the prolixity of Statius is quite sufficient. The Argives do not reach Thebes till half-way through the seventh book,[550] the brothers do not meet till half-way through the eleventh book. The result is that the compression of events in the last 300 lines of the eleventh book and in the last book is almost grotesque; for these 1,100 lines contain the death of Jocasta, the banishment of Oedipus, the flight of the Argives, the prohibition to bury the Argive dead, the arrival of the wives of the vanquished, the devotion of Antigone and Argia, the wife of Polynices, their detection and sentencing to death, the arrival of the Athenians under Theseus, the defeat and death of Creon, and the burial of the fallen. The effect is disastrous. As we have seen, this appendix to the main story of the feud between the brothers cannot form a satisfactory conclusion to the story. Treated with the perfunctory compression of Statius, it becomes flat and ineffective; even the reader who finds Statius at his best attractive is tempted to throw down the _Thebais_ in disgust. It is perhaps in his concluding scenes that we see Statius at his worst, but his capacity for irrelevance and digression is an almost equally serious defect. That he should use the conventional supernatural machinery is natural and permissible, though tedious to the modern reader, who finds it hard to sympathize with outworn literary conventions. But there are few epics where divine intervention is carried to a greater extent than in the _Thebais_.[551] And not content with the intervention of the usual gods and furies, on two occasions Statius brings down frigid abstractions from the skies in the shape of Virtus[552] and Pietas.[553] Again, while auguries and prophecies play a legitimate part in such a work, nothing can justify, and only the passion of the Silver Age for the supernatural can explain, the protraction of the scenes of augury at Thebes and Argos to 114 and 239 lines respectively. Equally disproportionate are the catalogues of the Argive and the Theban armies, making between them close on 400 lines.[554] Nor is imitation of Vergil the slightest justification for introducing a night-raid in which Hopleus and Dymas are but pale reflections of Nisus and Euryalus,[555] for expending 921 lines over the description of the funeral rites and games in honour of the infant Opheltes,[556] or putting the irrelevant history of the heroism of Coroebus in the mouth of Adrastus, merely that it may form a parallel to