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Persius 5.129–31*

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  11 February 2009

J. D. Morgan
Affiliation:
University of Delaware

Extract

This is the reading of Clausen's OCT, in which no variant for line 131 is recorded in the apparatus.

No doubt the hendiadys ‘scutica et metus…erilis’ is not impossible,2 but it seems to me not to be a well chosen expression. Since the scutica belongs to the master, one is tempted to construe erilis with both nouns, not just with metus. But then the adjective must function in two different ways: ‘scutica… erilis’ is possessive, ‘his master's strap’, but ‘metus…erilis’ is objective, ‘fear of his master’. And ‘metus…erilis’ in this passage receives no support from ‘erilis…metus’ at Plautus, Amphitruo 1069, which means ‘fear for my mistress’.

Type
Shorter Notes
Copyright
Copyright © The Classical Association 1988

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References

1 Clausen, W. V. [ed.], A. Persi Flacci et D. Iunii Iuvenalis Saturae (Oxford, 1959)Google Scholar, ad loc.

2 Persius is not overly enamoured of hendiadys; his only other example of this figure is at 1.77–8 ‘sunt quos Pacuuiusque et uerrucosa moretur | Antiopa, aerumnis cor luctificabile fulta’, where the constraints of the metre may well have influenced him.

3 Clausen, W. V. [ed.], A. Persi Flacci Satwarum Liber (Oxford, 1956)Google Scholar, ad loc.

4 From a microfilm ofP, kindly furnished by the Bibliothèque interuniversitaire de Montpellier, Section médecine, I have verified that its reading is indeed ‘scytice & metus egit erilis’. One possibility is that in an ancestor of P which read ‘scuticae metus egit erilis’ the ‘&’ was entered as a variant; another is that P's ‘scytice’ is the result of the correction of one of its ancestors against a codex which read ‘scuticae metus egit erilis’.

5 In verses 87, 105, 112, and 190, as observed by Clausen on p. xvi of his editio maior.