United States or Spain ? Vote for the TOP Country of the Week !
I can hear him now, speaking the lines of the poet Statius, who spoke for Dante: “I was famous on earth with the name which endures longest and honors most. The seeds of my ardor were the sparks from that divine flame whereby more than a thousand have kindled; I speak of the Æneid, mother to me and nurse to me in poetry.”
The Silvae is a collection of poems almost entirely in heroic verse, divided into five books, and for the most part written extempore. Statius himself affirms, in his Dedication to Stella, that the production of none of them employed him more than two days; yet many of them consist of between one hundred and two hundred hexameter lines.
Every reader of the Divine Comedy must be struck by the veneration which Dante expresses for writers far inferior to himself. He will not lift up his eyes from the ground in the presence of Brunetto, all whose works are not worth the worst of his own hundred cantos. He does not venture to walk in the same line with the bombastic Statius. His admiration of Virgil is absolute idolatry.
It is these men that Statius so adroitly flatters; it is to them that he looks for countenance, for patronage, for more substantial rewards; and yet so wretched is the recompense even of the highest popularity, that Statius would have to beg his bread if he did not find a better employer in the actor and manager, Paris, who pays him handsomely for the tragedies that at each successive exhaustion of his exchequer he is fain to write for the taste of a corrupt mob.
For Lucretius had limed the wings of his swift spirit in the dregs of the sensible world; and Virgil, with a modesty that ill became his genius, had affected the fame of an imitator, even whilst he created anew all that he copied; and none among the flock of mock-birds, though their notes were sweet, Apollonius Rhodius, Quintus Calaber, Nonnus, Lucan, Statius, or Claudian, have sought even to fulfil a single condition of epic truth.
Pliny tells us, that his Calpurnia, whenever he pleaded an important cause, had messengers ready to report to her every murmur of applause that he received; and the poet Statius, in alluding to his own victories at the Albanian Games, mentions the "breathless kisses," with which his wife, Claudia, used to cover the triumphal garlands he brought home. Mrs.
Statius Priscus, Avidius Cassius, and Martius Verus, were the most important of these officers; and it was by them, and not by Verus himself, that the military operations were, in fact, conducted.
Believe me, when I read your letter and his I jumped for joy, and I both thank and congratulate you: for if the fidelity and good character of my own Statius is a delight to me, how much more valuable must those same qualities be in your man, since there is added to them knowledge of literature, conversational powers, and culture, which have advantages even over those useful virtues!
While other heirs of noble houses were inspecting patterns of steinkirks and sword knots, dangling after actresses, or betting on fighting cocks, he was in pursuit of the Mentz editions of Tully's Offices, of the Parmesan Statius, and of the inestimable Virgin of Zarottus.
This would scarcely elucidate the problem. The dog and the horse share apparently Schopenhauer's metaphysical propensity with man. The familiar aphorism of Statius: PRIMUS IN ORBE DEOS FECIT TIMOR, points to the relation of animism first to the belief in ghosts, thence to Polytheism, and ultimately to Monotheism. Probably spirits and ghosts were originally of an evil kind.
Word Of The Day