Hylas Seized By Water-Nymphs: painting by William Etty (1833). This romantic episode from the voyage of the
Argonauts was described by several Hellenistic and Roman poets, including Valerius Flaccus, who introduced
one or two new elements into the story (e.g. the idea that Hylas came to the spring in pursuit of a deer, not in
search of water).
But whereas Lucretius' wrestle with the complexities of Epicurean physics is inspired by deep moral seriousness
and driven forward by a formidable intellectual energy, the Astronomica seems to be at heart a literary exercise.
The game of putting sums into polished hexameters is essentially pointless and quickly becomes tedious. In other
parts of the work Manilius reveals himself as a poet of considerable talent, with a gift for the sonorous line and
the piquant phrase; but his gifts have not found an adequate object.
The epic poet had two types of model before him, the mythological (such as the Aeneid) and the historical, such
as Ennius' Annales. Silius Italicus (c. 26-101) got the worst of both worlds by trying to combine the two: his
Punka, which is (alas) the longest of classical Latin poems, relates Hannibal's invasion of Italy, but with the full
mythological apparatus of divine interventions, a descent to the underworld, and so on. The result is painfully
incongruous. The Argonautica of Valerius Flaccus (died c. 92) and the Thebaid of Statius (c. 45-96), both
mythological epics, are better; but though both poets had talent, neither found a way of imparting genuine
freshness and life to his subject. Few are those -who have read to the end of either work for pleasure. Of Statius'
other verse there survives the Achilleid, a fragment of an uncompleted epic, and the Silvae, a collection of
mostly occasional poems, of which the shortest (5.4), nineteen lines addressed by the insomniac poet to the god
of sleep, is deservedly well known.
But, as Martial unkindly observed (10. 4), there was not much life left in the old mythology now: 'You who read
of Oedipus and of Thyestes in the dark, of Colchian women and Scyllas, of what are you reading but
monsters? ... Why does the empty nonsense of a wretched sheet please you? Read this, of which life can say, "It
is mine." You will not find Centaurs, Gorgons, or Harpies here; my page smells of man.' (Oedipus appears in
Statius' Thebaid; Seneca had composed a Thyestes.) The one man who found a way to reinvigorate the epic
genre was Lucan. He went to history for his theme, but to history told in a wholly new way.