Page:Statius (Mozley 1928) v1.djvu/24

the sprinkling of recondite mythological allusion that made Statius a popular poet with the audiences of Flavian Rome.

(VI.) Statius takes great liberties with the Latin language. There are phrases which it is impossible to make sense of, if taken grammatically and literally. Legras is reduced to despair by some, as by v. 115 “vel iustos cuius pulsantia menses vota tument?” he says “c’est, si on l’ose dire, un pur charabia^[1]”; so too “raptus ab omni sole dies” (v. 364), where the scholiast is compelled to exclaim “nove dictum!” and, perhaps the most untranslatable of all, “viderat Inachias rapidum glomerare cohortes Bacchus iter” (vii. 45). It is impossible, in translating, to do more than give the general sense; the poet is here a pure “impressionist.” Postgate has made a similar comment on the style of Propertius (Select Elegies, Introduction, p. lx), “The outlines of his pictures lack sharpness and precision, and the colours and even forms on his canvas tend to blend imperceptibly with each other. Thus it is the general impression that fascinates us in his poems, not the proportion and perfection of the details.” Again, speaking of Propertius’ excessive subtlety of construction, he says “sometimes the sentence must be read as a whole, as it is almost impossible to give it a detailed construction. . . . Cf. i. 20. 24, where I have compared the tendency of the Greek tragedians to spread the meaning through a sentence rather than apportion it among the words.” This very well expresses the character of the Statian phrase, and in this respect Statius is the successor of Propertius. Both poets perhaps were led to write in this way by an attempt