Statius quotes - page 4
In your calm bosom have made their dwelling a dignity that charms and virtue gay yet weighty. Not for you lazy repose or unjust power or vaulting ambition, but a middle way leading through the Good and the Pleasant. Of stainless faith and a stranger to passion, private while ordering your life for all to see, a despiser too of gold yet none better at displaying your wealth to advantage and letting the light in upon your riches.
Statius
But the child, lying in the bosom of the vernal earth and deep in herbage, now crawls forward on his face and crushes the soft grasses, now in clamorous thirst for milk cries for his beloved nurse; again he smiles, and would fain utter words that wrestle with his infant lips, and wonders at the noise of the woods, or plucks at aught he meets, or with open mouth drinks in the day, and strays in the forest all ignorant of its dangers, in carelessness profound.
Statius
Atlas' grandson obeys his sire's words and hastily thereupon binds the winged sandals on to his ankles and with his wide hat covers his locks and tempers the stars. Then he thrusts the wand in his right hand; with this he was wont to banish sweet slumber or recall it, with this to enter black Tartarus and give life to bloodless phantoms. Down he leapt and shivered as the thin air received him. No pause; he takes swift and lofty flight through the void and traces a vast arc across the clouds.
Statius
So a lioness that has newly whelped, beset by Numidian hunters in her cruel den, stands upright over her young, gnashing her teeth in grim and piteous wise, her mind in doubt; she could disrupt the groups and break their weapons with her bite, but love for her offspring binds her cruel heart and from the midst of her fury she looks round at her cubs.
Statius
What if by such crime you sought both of heavens boundaries, that to which the Sun looks when he is sent forth from the eastern hinge and that to which he gazes as he sinks from his Iberian gate, and those lands he touches from afar with slanting ray, lands the North Wind chills or the moist South warms with his heat?
Statius
So when ebbing Nile hides himself in his great caverns and holds in his mouth the liquid nurture of an eastern winter, the valleys smoke forsaken by the flood and gaping Egypt awaits the sounds of her watery father, until at their prayers he grants sustenance to the Pharian fields and brings on a great harvest year.
Statius
Oedipus had already probed his impious eyes with guilty hand and sunk deep his shame condemned to everlasting night; he dragged out his life in a long-drawn death. He devotes himself to darkness, and in the lowest recess of his abode he keeps his home on which the rays of heaven never look; and yet the fierce daylight of his soul flits around him with unflagging wings and the Avengers of his crimes are in his heart.
Statius
