cum superis terrena placent, tua turba relicto labetur caelo miscebitque oscula iuxta. ibit in amplexus natus fraterque paterque et soror: una locum cervix dabit omnibus astris.
When heaven takes its joy of earth, thy kin shall leave heaven and glide down to earth and kiss thee face to face. Thy son and sister, thy brother and thy sire, shall come to thy embrace; and about thy sole neck shall all the stars of heaven find a place.
The poem on the emperor's sexless favourite, Earinus, can scarcely be quoted here. Without being definitely coarse, it succeeds in being one of the most disgusting productions in the whole range of literature. The emperor who can accept flattery of such a kind has certainly qualified for assassination. The lighter poems are almost distressingly trivial, and it is but a poor excuse to plead that such triviality was imposed by the artificial social life of the day and the jealous tyranny of Domitian. Moreover, the tendency to preciosity, which was kept in check in the _Thebais_ by the requirements of epic, here has full play. The death of a boy in his fifteenth year is described as follows (ii. 6, 70):
vitae modo cardine adultae nectere temptabat iuvenum pulcherrimus ille cum tribus Eleis unam trieterida lustris.
Come now to the turning-point where boyhood becomes manhood, he, the fairest of youths, was on the point of linking three olympiads (twelve years) with a space of three years.
Writers of elegiac verse are addressed as (i. 2. 250)
'qui nobile gressu extremo fraudatis opus'.
Ye that cheat the noble march of your verse of its last stride.
A new dawn is expressed by an astounding periphrasis (iv. 6. 15):
ab Elysiis prospexit sedibus alter Castor et hesternas risit Tithonia mensas.
Castor in turn looked forth from the halls of Elysium and Tithonus' bride made merry over yesterday's feasts. [Castor and Pollux lived on alternate days.]
There is, in fact, no limit in these poems to Statius' luxuriance in far-fetched and often obscure mythological allusions. In spite, however, of such cardinal defects as these, the _Silvae_ present a brilliant though superficial picture of the cultured society of the day and contain much that is pretty, and something that is poetic.[585] Take, for instance, the poem in which the poet writes to console Atedius Melior for the death of his favourite Glaucias, a _puer delicatus_. The work is hopelessly clever and hopelessly insincere. Statius exaggerates at once the charms of the dead boy and the grief of Atedius and himself. But at the conclusion he works up an old commonplace into a very pretty piece of verse. He has been describing the reception of Glaucias in the underworld (ii. 1. 208):