[citation needed] Throughout their correspondence and when they met in Strasbourg during the winter of 1631/32 Morsius insisted on Furichius expanding the Aurea Catena to a great alchemical scientific poem which was published in 1631 as the Four Books of Chryseis — Chryseidos Libri IIII.
[7] The Chryseidos Libri IIII[8] consists of approximately 1.600 hexametric verses, divided into four books, to which Furichius added his own glosses and wrote a versatile author's commentary, i. e. appendixed Scholia - which were all printed within the 1631-edition.
[9] Yet while Augurelli's work is structurally clinging to Virgil's five books of the Georgics and is kept in an instructive style, Furichius opts for the form of a fantasmagorical travelogue in verse which he seeks to interlink with most scientific and literary discourses of his time.
Book two then introduces the first-person narrator Chrysanthus who recounts his adventures in a fantastical Libyan desert where he encounters a speaking raven, a dreadful dragon, is infested with divine visions and finally meets Hermes Trismegistos, who serves as hermit high priest of an alchemitised Proserpina (figuring as the eponymous Chryseis).
[13] In his additions Furichius furthermore stresses his inspiration by Ludovico Ariosto's (1474–1533) Orlando Furioso and - apart from many genuinely alchemical references, even to Byzantine sources,[14] and hommages to George Ripley (ca.