Hostname: page-component-cd9895bd7-gxg78 Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-12-26T03:54:02.906Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

On the Cruces of Horace, Satires, 2. 2.

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  11 February 2009

A. Y. Campbell
A. Y. Campbell
Affiliation:
THE UNIVERSITY OF LIVERPOOL.
Get access Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

Extract

The ‘four famous cruces’ (Gow, ed. p. 4) of this satire are as interesting as notorious. I regard the first as solved, since I cannot imagine anybody (Horace included) improving upon Postgate's line 13 (see below). But I find instead a hitherto undetected but quite palpable flaw in the opening words.

Type
Research Article
Information
The Classical Quarterly , Volume 1 , Issue 3-4 , July 1951 , pp. 136 - 142
Copyright
Copyright © The Classical Association 1951

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

References

1 I am again indebted to Prof. Fletcher for kindly reading and criticizing this article in manuscript; also for supplying me with additional illustrations as indicated.

2 To assign to Ofellus directly lines 1 and 4–52 would not be a possible alternative; this is patently no ‘rusticus’ admonishing other rustics (with boni as = ‘my lads’); the terms of 16 (promus), 23–4, 31–3, 50–2, and other passages, indicate the townsman.

1 The view of Lambinus-‘seu pila te agit (hide pila), seu discus, pete aera disco’-defended by Housman in C.R. xv. 405 (and on Lucan 7. 323), is, in my judgement, a (prima facie) very obvious one, but rhetorically inexcusable, because the imperative sperne (‘despise, if you can!’) which is exactly right, has its force ruined by this preceding pete (‘assail, if you care to’); for that and other reasons the whole sentence seems to me at this rate far too maladroit for Horace.

2 In C.Q. xxxix. 46–48 I took over the identification, more or less traditional with editors of H. and Juvenal (cf. L. & S.), of lupus with pike, but Sir D'Arcy Thompson in a letter tells me that the fish denoted ‘is the basse, Labrax lupus (L.)’. I regret that in my footnote 3 I misunderstood his note in C.R. Iii. 166–7. My argument on Juvenal 5. 103–6 depends almost entirely on the word lupus and is not actually affected.

1 And again, for obsonia thus in (logical) connexion with rancidum cf. Juvenal n. 134–5 obsonia rancidula.

1 Or did erat culpa come from what looked like erat cpullal