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Four Lucretian emendations

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  23 January 2012

David Butterfield*
Affiliation:
Christ's College, Cambridge

Extract

      3.912–18:
      hoc etiam faciunt ubi discubuere tenentque
      pocula saepe homines et inumbrant ora coronis,
      ex animo ut dicant: ‘breuis hic est fructus homullis;
      iam fuerit neque post umquam reuocare licebit.’ 915
      tamquam in morte mali cum primis hoc sit eorum,
      quod sitis exurat miseros atque arida †torrat†,
      aut aliae quoius desiderium insideat rei.

917 torrat OIQ: torret Oa.c. : terra FC : torreat Gifanius : torres Lachmann: tortet Romanes : torqueat Wakefield : torrant Bockemüller aridus torror Housman

The sole difficulty of this passages lies at the close of 917. If atque introduces a second (necessarily subjunctive) verb, torrat of the paradosis would be an unparalleled third-conjugation form and is therefore highly improbable; the ungrammatical torret in O pre-correction can be readily dismissed. I find little attraction in Lachmann's and Housman's introduction of nominal forms, particularly since 918 implies that the reference in 917 is to a single torment (i.e. sitis). Romanes (1934) 25 conjectured tortet, which is supported neither by Lucretian usage nor the corpus of extant Latin.

Type
Research Article
Copyright
Copyright © The Author(s). Published online by Cambridge University Press 2009

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Footnotes

1

I am most grateful to Prof. E. J. Kenney, Dr M. Deufert and the anonymous readers for CCJ for their helpful remarks throughout.

References

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