Page:Statius (Mozley 1928) v1.djvu/14

effects of alliteration and assonance, its brilliant passages, startling tricks of style and language, its avoidance of the obvious and occasional touches of the pathetic and the horrible, all this combined to tickle the ears and feelings of the popular audiences of the day.^[1] Or again, with an Italian’s gift of rapid improvisation, he would delight a patron by dashing off a description of his villa in marvellously smooth hexameters, or oblige him with occasional verse on any subject, serious or trivial.

The poetry of Statius shows many of the characteristics of the Silver Age. (i.) The rhetorical influence is evident, frequency of hyperbole, straining after epigram and point, superficiality and obedience to text-book models. (ii.) There is a tendency to realism which shows itself now in the petty, now in the horrible, as for instance in many of the battle-scenes of the Thebaid. (iii.) There is a general diminution of scale, characteristic perhaps of Silver periods of literature, when the great subjects are exhausted and poets descend to more trivial themes; or, if the grand themes are still attempted, the treatment is unequal to them, and lack of proportion is the inevitable result. The search for new matter takes the form of describing things that the great poets would not have thought worth describing, or not suitable to poetry. The Description, indeed, as such, the ἔκφρασις, becomes a recognized literary form. (iv.) Another note of the age is the conscious learning which obtrudes itself into many a passage; poets could draw on learned compilations of mythological matter and general information, on treatises dealing