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Four Lucretian emendations
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 23 January 2012
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.
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- Copyright © The Author(s). Published online by Cambridge University Press 2009
Footnotes
I am most grateful to Prof. E. J. Kenney, Dr M. Deufert and the anonymous readers for CCJ for their helpful remarks throughout.