Page:Statius (Mozley 1928) v1.djvu/349

This page has been proofread, but needs to be validated.

SILVAE, V. iii. 78–98

thou,[1] when mighty Hector was dead, didst stoop to serve a Haemonian lord.

I shall not bring to my father’s pyre that tribute of death-music which the swan when he knows his doom sends to the world beneath, nor the warning strains surpassing sweet that the Tyrrhenian[2] winged maids chant to mariners from the fatal cliff: no sorrowful tongueless plaint of Philomela to her cruel sister: the minstrel knows them all too well. Who by the grave’s side has not recounted all the branches and all the amber tears of the Sun’s daughters, and Phrygia’s flinty rock, and him who dared make music against Phoebus, while Pallas rejoiced that the boxwood-pipe deceived him?*[3] Nay, let Pity that has forgotten men,[4] and Justice recalled to heaven, and Eloquence in either tongue bewail thee, and Pallas and the Heliconian train of minstrel Phoebus; those also whose toil it is to guide Aonian song in six-foot measures,[5] and they who fit their strains to the Arcadian tortoise-shell,[6] and find in the lyre their labour and renown, those whom ’neath every sky sublimest Wisdom counts in the sevenfold roll of Fame[7]; they who in the dread buskin have thundered out the fury and the wickedness of kings, and told of the sun’s light hidden from the earth, and they whose joy it is to relax their powers in Thalia’s

  1. ↑ i.e., Andromache, mother of Astyanax; she became the slave of Neoptolemus, son of Achilles after the death of her husband, Hector.
  2. ↑ See on ii. 2. 1.
  3. ↑ Pallas had her own reasons for disliking the flute, and was therefore glad when it betrayed Marsyas. The other references are to the daughter of the Sun who wept for Phaëthon, and to Niobe (from Mt. Sipylus in Phrygia, where the figure of Niobe was, according to legend).
  4. ↑ See iii. 3. 1 n.
  5. ↑ i.e., the epic hexameter. Aonian = of the Muses, lit. = Boeotian.
  6. ↑ i.e., lyric, suggested by “carmen” and “mensis.”
  7. ↑ The Seven Wise Men; probably prose composition generally.

311

This article is issued from Wikisource. The text is available under Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 4.0 unless otherwise noted. Additional terms may apply for the media files.