Statius: Thebaid, Vol. 1

(iv. 3), an entertainment in the Amphitheatre (i. 6). Among the personages introduced are the poet's own friend and patron Pollius Felix, wealthy and cultured, the literary Epicurean Manlius Vopiscus, the soldier Rutilius Gallicus, of noble birth and distinguished career, the young Maecius Celer, just off to the Syrian front, the art-collector Novius Vindex, the freedman Claudius Etruscus, who had risen from slavery to the position of secretary of finance to the Emperor Nero, one of the three great secretaryships of the early Empire.

By far the greater number of these pieces are written in hexameters, a metre first applied by Statius, so far as we know, to the composition of genre poems of this kind, and employed with marvellous facility and ease; the lines run smoothly, though without the extreme elaboration that we sometimes find in the Thebaid, and without great attention to variation of pause, or subtlety of alliterative effect. He displays wonderful skill in expression and choice of phrase; when describing, for instance, the water flowing in its silver channels in the Baths of Claudius Etruscus, he says (i. 5. 48):

The happy wave is thrust forward in silver
and falls in silver, and lingers on the gleaming edges,
admiring its own charms and refusing to depart.

and, of the stream outside:

But outside, the river which, azure by the snowy
bank, lives on.

In his address to his wife, again, speaking of the peacefulness of Naples, he says (iii. 5. 87):

No madness of the forum or laws stretched for the sake of strife,
but only the laws of character for men, and equity without the fasces.