Aeneid - Book VIII

[AoM]

Thank you Brill for introducing me to the amazing word that is "psychopomp".

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Psychopomp

 

[AoM]

Quoting someone else:

“Horace was as sensitive to iteration as any modern … Virgil was less sensitive, Ovid much less; Lucan was almost insensible.”

 

[AoM]

What a sentence.

“Tib. notes here all the impressive elements inherent to a story of infantile strangulation of herpetological horrors.”

 

[AoM]

“Varro (DLL 5.41) records the tradition that the name was derived from the human caput that was discovered on the site durving [sic] exacavation [sic] for the temple of Capitoline Jupiter (cf. Livy 1.55.5; Goldschmidt 2013, 98 on the evidence of Fabius Pictor).”

--

“Guys... maybe we should, y'know, build this temple somewhere else.”

 

[Pacifica]

durving [sic] exacavation [sic]

That made me laugh.

 

[AoM]

Yeah, I was like, "Wait, two... in a row?"

 

[AoM]

“now the Arcadian Evander puts Aeneas to bed on the same ursine covering...”

 

[AoM]

Sounds like I need to read some Henry.

“Henry’s note here on the closing of Japan to western missionaries, complete with references to ‘Armstrong guns, Congreve rockets, rum, the Bible, and English calicoes,’ must be read to be believed.”

 

[AoM]

This bit is still funny to me.

nec pater omnipotens Troiam nec fata vetabant
stare decemque alios Priamum superesse per annos.

"Oh, sorry about that, Venus. If you had just asked at the time, we could've postponed all that death and stuff."

 

[AoM]

“Eden follows Servius in arguing that the fires of the forge have eaten out the rocks, rather than that the rocks were eaten out for the purpose of constructing a workshop.”

Phrasing, phrasing!

 

[AoM]

Seems to be a split here:

ter leto sternendus erat (566)

Dative or ablative?

 

[Pacifica]

Ablative seems more likely.

 

[AoM]

Yeah, that's what I'll probably go with.

ipse neque aversos dignatur sternere morti (12.464) is cited for the dative, and the Brill says it's "good poetic Latin" (found in the tragedies of Ennius, Pacuvius, Accius).

 

[Pacifica]

Ah, that made me change my mind. If the construction with an unambiguous dative is attested in the same work, it's probably dative here too.

 

[AoM]

Though these are cited in support of the ablative:

interea Rutuli portis circum omnibus instant / sternere caede viros (10.118-9)
sterneret ut subita turbatam morte Camillam / adnuit oranti (11.796-7)

 

[Pacifica]

Gah! I'm changing my mind again. Lol. Could the morti example be a dubious reading, by any chance?

 

[Pacifica]

Google at any rate seems to have morti everywhere in the ipse neque aversos... line. No alternative reading with morte. Maybe Vergil just switched between the two constructions, and in that case it's impossible to know for sure which one he meant in leto, though statistics make the ablative slightly more likely. At the end of the day, it doesn't matter hugely, because the meaning stays pretty much the same.

 

[AoM]

I think I might actually go with the dative.

A weird reason, but I like the chiasmus!

leto sternendus (8)
sternere caede (10)
sterneret...morte (11)
sternere morti (12)

 

[Dantius]

Lol, that's the most extended and obscure chiasmus I've seen (although probably not deliberate).

 

[AoM]

Henry definitely sounded... interesting.

“Henry’s bizarre rant here on “… that second, that greater Romulus, the
swarthy, squat, big-headed, flat-nosed Hunn” (Attila) is not to be missed.”