Ciris 89–91

Extract

The most popular emendation has been Heinsius's somnia sunt. I find the tone of this misplaced (cf. F. Leo, Ausg. Kl. Sckriften, ii. 118–19). Thepoet has since 66 laboriously catalogued variant aetiologies of Scylla monstrum. It is inappropriate that he should immediately follow this with the statement that all of them were ‘fancy’ or ‘nonsense’. For a start, we may note that the summation quidquid et ut quisque … presumably includes the version of Homer (66), to whose authority the poet had appealed (62) in the case of the erroneous contamination of the two Scyllas. Next, I suppose that if Scylla monstrum had been the subject of his poem, the poet might have wanted to say that some of the versions were wrong—or at least of less good authority, or less attractive than others for one reason or another. But Scylla monstrum is not the subject of his poem. He confutes, because it is his concern, the contamination; the listing of the rest, variants in a story not his subject, issues largely from an ‘Alexandrian’ delight in such learned display. It calls for no estimation of their lightness or wrongness: neither relative to one another—and certainly not absolutely.