Chapter L: Book VI: , in connexion with the games, and well over twenty in many of

the other books. They are elaborated often to the extent of six lines, sometimes to eight, and show considerable variety. Many that illustrate violent action introduce such animals as lions, tigresses, wolves, bears, boars, bulls; others picture birds in flight like cranes, or twittering like swallows: a snowstorm, a hunter, a passing ship, a ruined nest, a Spanish gold miner underground, an avalanche (which the old Delphin edition illustrates from Rhaetia), or a cow grieving for a lost calf (a passage that recalls a similar situation in Lucretius). King Adrastus is likened to a victorious bull, and Hippomedon to a Centaur; runners are compared cumulatively to race-horses, arrows, and stags escaping from a lion; and a falling quoit to the moon brought down from heaven by magic.

The hexameters of Statius exhibit less monotony than do those of Ovid, Lucan or Valerius Flaccus. He secures this greater variety by dexterity in the use of pauses. His metrical movements are composed with skill, and often are felicitously appropriate to the sense, as in the passage on Night and Sleep in _Thebaid_ I, where he brings into juxtaposition a line with five spondees and one with five dactyls, then has a quick line of four dactyls, returns to a slow movement of five spondees, and closes on one where the feet are exactly balanced:

Titanis late, mundo subuecta silenti,
Rorifera gelidum tenuauerat aera biga;
Iam pecudes uolucresque tacent, iam Somnus amaris
Inrepsit curis pronusque ex aethere nutat
Grata laboratae referens obliuia uitae.

Computations[1443] have been made which show that, while Statius is more dactylic than Virgil, he is less so than Ovid and Valerius. He has fewer elisions than Virgil. Altogether his line falls short of supreme epic dignity. In the _Siluae_ his hendecasyllabics, unlike Catullus’s but like Martial’s, regularly begin with a spondee. His two imitations of Horatian lyric metres display small inspiration. But in the _Siluae_ his hexameters appear to most advantage, attaining a facility suitable to the lighter and more sportive subjects in the collection. Here, then, Statius is in matter and form most truly himself. He portrays in the main the surface of life, and is acquainted with its amenities and even its pathos; but he does not penetrate into its meaning.