Like the poems reprinted by Professor Donno, these establish their identity as minor epics by the erotic subject matter of their narration, however symbolized or moralized, and by their use of certain rhetorical devices that came to be associated with the genre. These include the set description of people and places; the =suasoria=, or invitation to love; and the formal digression, sometimes in the form of an inset tale, such as the tale of Poplar in =Mirrha= (pp. 148-155). Other rhetorical devices cultivated in the epyllion are the long apostrophe, and the sentence or wise saying. Also, these poems employ numerous compound epithets and far-fetched conceits. (Dom Diego goes hunting with a "beast-dismembring blade" [p. 64], and Cinyras incestuous bed in =The Scourge= "doth shake and quaver as they lie,/As if it groan'd to beare the weight of sinne." [p. 271].) The average length of these, like other Renaissance minor epics, is about 900 lines. Although the length of Renaissance minor epics is not rigidly prescribed, it is noteworthy that several of these poems have almost the same number of lines. =Philos and Licia=, =Mirrha=, and =Hiren=, for example, running to about 900 lines, vary in length by no more than 16 lines. (=Amos and Laura=, however, the shortest with about 300 lines, is some 650 lines shorter than =The Scourge=, the longest, with about 950.) As well as echoing Marlowe's =Hero and Leander= and Shakespeare's =Venus and Adonis= in particular words and phrases, these poems reveal a much more general indebtedness to what Professor Bush has aptly called "the twin peaks of the Ovidian tradition in England."[27] The majority employ one of two prosodic patterns--the Marlovian couplet popularized in =Hero and Leander=, or the six-line stanza used by Lodge but soon after taken over by Shakespeare in =Venus and Adonis= and thereafter associated with his poem.[28] In addition to the couplet, a common mark of Marlovian influence in the poems is the etiological myth, sometimes expanded into a tale. Thus, in =Mirrha=, for instance, the growth of rare spices and perfumes in Panchaia is explained by the story of how Hebe once spilled nectar there (p. 147).