Chapter XXXI: Book VIII: Only one course is now open to Medea. In terror at her own

acts and afraid of her father, she bids farewell to the palace and joins her lover in the forest. There is still the Fleece to win. To enable Jason to carry it off, she charms the guardian Dragon to sleep, though, as she bends over the prostrate beast which hitherto she has fed, she cannot but utter her sorrow for it when it wakes to realize the theft. But now there is need for despatch; and the supporting tree yields up the Fleece to the hero, while melancholy gloom gathers in the place; but elsewhere the land is lit up by the brilliant gold as he bears it away. Cheers rise from his men: the Argo draws near to meet him; and he hastens aboard with Medea.

Meanwhile dismay invades the palace on the discovery of her flight. Her mother, who has hitherto played no part, comes into the story with a rhetorical apostrophe to her fugitive daughter—she would fain scratch the face of the robber; she would have Fleece or any other sacred thing taken, if only Medea were given back; and details (_singula_) now too late recur to the queen’s mind that should have betrayed Medea’s love for the Thessalian; that was why she had no appetite (_nullae dapes_)! The scene changes: the lonely princess is at sea, the one woman among foreigners, uncertain whether the man for whom she has sacrificed so much will make her his bride. This anxiety ends, however, with their marriage in the island of Peuce. But the festivities are disturbed by the arrival of Medea’s brother Absyrtus with a fleet which Valerius wishes his readers to believe was very suddenly built. The Argonauts grumble over the prospect of attack from their Colchian pursuers, and would restore the girl if they might keep the Fleece. Jason does not hold out boldly against his men’s advice, but, with groans and qualms about his plighted troth, meditates treachery to his bride. So, within less than one hundred lines of the abrupt close, Valerius brings out the worst in Jason’s character. Divining his cowardice, Medea remonstrates with argument and question and irony. Is she a captive on the vessel? May she not hear the plans proposed?

Most faithful husband mine, I know no fear;
Yet pity me and keep thy marriage vows
At least as far as some Thessalian port—
Then cast me off in thine own house! Thou knowest
’Twas thou, and not thy crew, swore faith to me.
Perchance they may have right to give me up;
But thou hast not the same prerogative,
And I must drag thee back with me; for I,
The guilty maid, am not their only quest:
All on this ship alike are fugitives.[1303]

Is he afraid, she asks, of her brother’s ships? Still even against a greater fleet she deserves to be defended.

Would God my love had not dared all for thee,
But felt a scruple! Nay, bethink thee now
Of fresh commands—Alack, is cruelty
So tongue-tied? Can this shamefast mien of thine
Bode aught but harm? I ask thee, who wert once
Mine own loved Jason—is it right that I,
That I, with suppliant breath, should pray to thee?[1304]

A night of agony over Jason’s pusillanimous ingratitude has wrought a change on the beautiful girl:

She comes not now the glory of her race
Nor the illustrious grandchild of the Sun,
Nor yet the flower of youthful savagedom,
As once when from the tree Chaonian
She bore the radiant Fleece in joy and ’mid
The mighty names of Greece on Pallas’ prow
Stood forth a Maid that seemed the Goddess’ peer.[1305]

Swayed two ways, Jason tries to say soothing words to Medea, and the epic breaks off leaving its hero discredited. The poet has, however, enlisted our sympathies for Medea, as Virgil has done for Dido.

Even the sketch just given serves to show that Valerius was not a slavish imitator of Apollonius of Rhodes. Certainly he owed him much in episodes, similes and ideas. But under each of these three heads he also shows independence. Episodes are amplified, abbreviated, or transferred, and original episodes are introduced; if some similes are copied, fresh ones are invented; and, if there is a certain amount of close rendering of the Greek text, there is, besides, a great proportion of the poem which is due not merely to borrowings from Homer and the Latin of Virgil, Ovid, Lucan and Seneca’s tragedies, but to Valerius’s own genius. Thus, while it is instructive to estimate his debt to Apollonius, it is equally instructive to remember the contrasts between them, and competent critics have studied this question.[1306] Broadly, in construction and probability of narrative he excels his Greek forerunner; but Valerius is most distinctively himself when he displays his gift of description, which is, on the whole, free from the flagrant vices of rhetoric and sometimes reaches a high level of beauty, and when he applies his psychological ability to the character of Medea. One cannot fail to see that in his unfolding of her love he is not tied to the Apollonian account: one notes the influence of Virgil’s Dido: one suspects Ovid’s influence as well; but there is no reason to deny to an artist like Valerius his own large share in elaborating his heroine’s passion.

It is, on several grounds, likely that the incompleteness of the epic was caused by the author’s death rather than by the ravages of time.[1307] Some of the charges of inconsistency and disconnectedness brought against Valerius by critics might have been averted, it is contended, had he lived to revise his epic. All the same, it must be remembered that Valerius took years over his work and might never have removed such blemishes. As Professor Summers points out, Statius’s echoes of Valerius’s language suggest familiarity with his poem; but of about a score of allusions which Statius makes to the Argonautic legend none bears on the return voyage of the heroes, and this is just the portion which is missing in Valerius. An interesting problem turns on the author’s design for finishing his epic. One may conjecture that he contemplated four more books to equate the number with Virgil’s twelve; and it is a plausible guess that he would have, in his closing books, evinced still more independence of his Greek model. Since he elects to place Jason’s marriage in Peuce, he presumably would have dropped the visit to Phaeacia. There is another feature which, while it illustrates his individuality, at the same time lends colour to the belief that he meant to bring his heroes into connexion with Italy.[1308] This feature is the frequency of the allusions to Rome and her customs which the poet engrafts upon this epic of early Greek mariners. Surprise is scarcely felt that at the beginning we should find his autobiographic hint about the Sibyl’s tripod in his house, or his references to recent Roman history in his invocation to Vespasian, or his desire that his poem should be famed in Latin-speaking cities.[1309] But the recurrent Roman note in the course of the narrative is more significant. Jove is made to foreshadow the coming of empires which must include Rome; Hypsipyle’s renown is to last as long as Roman chronicles; and allusions are made to Jupiter of the Alban mount and to the connexion of Rome with Troy.[1310] In the sixth book there is an anticipation of the military emblems of Rome; a likening of the battle between Perses and Aeetes to internecine strife between Roman legions; and illustrations are drawn from shipwrecks on the Latian coast and from hunting in Umbria.[1311] In the next book Jason is said to be as much dismayed by Aeetes’s refusal to keep his promise as a Tuscan pilot looking for the Tiber mouth but blown upon the quicksands off Africa; and Venus, disguised as daughter of the Sun, pretends to be consort of the Italian Picus and “queen of the Tuscan main.”[1312] These and other instances incline one to believe that Valerius was leading up to a sort of Italianization of his Greek theme in its later phases, in which case he would have been at once more national and more Virgilian. For, just as the later half of the _Aeneid_ has its scenes laid in Italy, so Valerius may have decided to imitate Virgil in bringing his Argonauts back by a route more familiar to a Roman reader than that by which they ventured out to Colchis. If the adventurers were to sail homewards by way of the North Sea past Britain and Gaul, this would have fittingly accorded with the address to Vespasian in the opening book; and poetic justice might have been done by prolonging the epic to include the death of Jason’s enemy Pelias.

The fact that there is only one classical mention of Valerius (that by Quintilian recognizing his death as a loss to literature) does not suggest that he had a wide vogue. Yet his influence is traceable in Statius and Silius;[1313] and Juvenal may be thinking of him in his gibe at the conveyance of “the gold of the stolen fleecelet.”[1314] After age-long oblivion, attention was once more directed to his poem by Poggio’s discovery at St. Gall in 1417 of a manuscript containing _Argonautica_ I-IV, 317. In spite of considerable poetic quality Valerius is not a readily quotable author. There is little criticism of life in him—little even in the way of the _sententia_: so readers have not found much to lay hold on, and his influence has been lessened. Thus, in estimating the classical sources of a work like William Morris’s _Life and Death of Jason_ it is the relation to Apollonius rather than that to Valerius that one makes prominent.

The language[1315] of Valerius is an interesting complex. As in the treatment of his epic theme he was both borrower and innovator, so with his style. Deeply influenced by Virgil and other predecessors, he yet strikes into fresh paths of expression: he even coins words. Among the compounds (many of them dactylic) which he loves, he revives old epithets like _auriger_, _omnituens_; uses rare ones, like _astrifer_, _gemmifer_, _luctifer_ (in Seneca also); notably shares some with Ovid like _piniger_, _reparabilis_, _turifer_; and others, like _monstrifer_ and _monstrificus_, with the elder Pliny. The adjectives _astrifer_, _flammiger_, _undisonus_ recur in Statius; _flammifer_ (which is Ennian, Lucretian and Ovidian), _auricomus_ (Virgilian), _securiger_, and others, recur in Silius. But he has adjectives that are entirely his, _aegisonus_, _arcipotens_, _implorabilis_, _intemerandus_, _soligena_, just as he has ἅπαξ εἰρημένα among his verbs like _protono_, _superincendo_, and among his nouns like _a(d)spiramen_, _lustramen, ouatus_ (“rejoicing”), _memoratrix_, _mugitor_, the last term being used in one of his references to volcanic activity:

As bellower Vesuvius pants, when he
In wrath awakes the panic-stricken towns.[1316]

There are also forcible applications of words in new connexions, or extensions of meaning: _e.g._ _Medea adnuitur thalamis_ (V. 258), “Medea is granted to the marriage-couch”; _inuasit habenis murmur_ (VII. 605), “attacked the horse’s _neighing_ with the reins,” _i.e._ “set bit and bridle to its mouth”; _ueteris sub nocte cupressi_ (I. 774), “beneath the night-like shadow of an old cypress-tree,” resembling the phrase _noctem implicat_ (VII. 598) of entangling a bull in a _cloud of darkness_, or Juvenal’s _tenebrae_ for “a dingy hovel.” _Fragor_ expresses vigorously news that comes in a crash:

A startling rumour spreads it thro’ the town—
“The King is summoning a thousand hands!”
(_regemque fragor per moenia differt_
_mille ciere manus_, I. 753).

The mixture of convention and boldness in Valerius makes him an intensely interesting linguistic study.

Despite his profound debt to Virgil, and traces of lines with a still more archaic flavour, the technique of Valerius’s verse is predominantly Ovidian. He recalls Ovid in dactylic movement, in lack of varied pauses, and in smooth versification. This smoothness of post-Ovidian poetry, which was based on a comparative avoidance of elision, missed that subtle entanglement of word with word which Virgil artistically employed to counteract some of the heaviness of the Latin language. Valerius has not the technical skill of Statius in hexameters: he is often monotonous in rhythm, in repetitions of words within a few lines, and in over-symmetric arrangement. Yet he is less monotonous than Lucan, although when the test is intellect, Valerius is unquestionably Lucan’s inferior. It is easy to illustrate some phases of his monotony: in Book VIII, a short one of 466 lines, one can count at least 35 dactylic verbs (_implicat_, _prosilit_, etc.) forming the first foot of the line, without counting other dactylic words like _uellera_ (at least four times), _immemor_ (at least twice). Some of his endings too are monotonous: _e.g._ _proles_ four times in less than ninety lines in Book IV,[1317] although we may accept this as an echo of ancient epic phraseology. It is also convention which prompts his alliterative effects such as these in his later books:[1318]

_impingit pecorique pauor qualesue profundum_
_per chaos occurrunt caecae sine uocibus umbrae_ (VII. 401-2)

or

_iam magis atque magis mentem super alta ferebat_ (_ib._ 473)

or

_fata domus luctumque ferens fraudemque fugamque_ (VIII. 135)

More subtle is the onomatopoeic effect which he achieves in describing the gloomy sea-cave

That knows nor daylight’s gifts nor starry flame,
Ill-starred abode that rocks to ocean’s boom
(_infelix domus et sonitu tremibunda profundi_).

To the credit of his common sense, he is less rhetorical than either Lucan or Statius. He rants less. He indulges in fewer epigrams. In eight books his _sententiae_ do not exceed a dozen.[1319] Doubtless, his similes are too numerous,[1320] but they are, as a rule, brief. Unfortunately, though some have beauty, others are in bad taste, like the comparison of the love-sick Medea to a dog going mad; and others are far-fetched, like the comparison of the flight of the Harpies to the rain of ashes from Vesuvius in eruption.[1321] He has his lapses into absurdities, hyperbole and artificiality. In the battle of Book VI there are extravagant details which recall Lucan; and the danger of mythology can be seen when Jason, instead of the simple question, “Where is Hercules?” asks, “Where is he who was equal to the monsters sent by his stepmother?”[1322] Such mythological allusions play their part along with inverted order of words and compact forms of expression in producing an effect sometimes far from clear: even though he is relatively free from laboured conceits, he falls far short of Virgil’s classic lucidity. There is undoubtedly in Valerius descriptive power, varied incident, vivid narrative, and the perennial attraction of the way of a man with a maid. Except for this last psychological interest his merits are mainly related to the objective and concrete with little to suggest that he had reflected profoundly on life or had any guidance or solace to offer to humanity.