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Pike and Eel: Juvenal 5, 103–6

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  11 February 2009

A. Y. Campbell
A. Y. Campbell
Affiliation:
University of Liverpool
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Extract

Recent discussion of the problems associated with glacie has been copious. It has arisen (C.R. lii. 56) out of Housman's note, which runs as follows: ‘glacie nemini, quantum scio, praeterquam mini et Schradero et Hadriano Valesio admirationem mouit: ceteris exploratum est frigore pisces maculosos fieri, eos praesertim qui torrentem cloacam, locum frigidissimum, penetrare soleant.’ In his 1931 reprint he added (p. xlvi): ‘Ruperti took exception to glacie, but only to its case’. Housman's ironically stated objection to the sense is indeed a formidable difficulty; though the other—the fact of the two ablatives and the vagueness of the former—is itself serious enough to provide an additional indication of corruption.

Type
Research Article
Information
The Classical Quarterly , Volume 39 , Issue 1-2 , January 1945 , pp. 46 - 48
Copyright
Copyright © The Classical Association 1945

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References

Page 46 note 1 ‘Clumsy syntax’—L. R. Palmer, l.c. infra.

Page 46 note 2 C.R. xxv. 240–1Google Scholar; Harvard Studies, xivii (1936), 11–12Google Scholar; CR. lii. 56–8, see further 115–16.

Page 46 note 3 Virtually; in C.R. lii. 166–7 Prof. Thompson proposed glacus, but very tentatively. The word is not extant in Latin, and appears to be a scribe's blunder in Greek. Professor Thompson's identification of λάβραξ with pike would seem (if a non-biologist may say so) to be disproved by the fact that the λάβραξ was a marine fish; see Galen, Kühn, vi. 714, and Oppian, , Hal. I. 112–20Google Scholar; and cf. n. 4.

Page 46 note 4 His fish is rendered unpalatable by the drains of Rome; is better above the city; and is contrasted with those (inferentially of same species) in a tributary of the Tiber, the Nar, where they are exercised against the current—a feature which corresponds to the iactatus of Horace, (Sermn. 2. 2. 31–7)Google Scholar and the aduerso torrente of Columella (8.16. 4). I can find no Greek word for pike (cf. p. 46, n. 3), and this may explain the apparently substantival τιβερῖνος.

Page 47 note 1 The pike is a freshwater fish, but the reference will be to those at the Tiber's mouth; alto captus as Horace says.

Page 47 note 2 Cf. e.g. Plin. 9. 15. 17, § 44 ‘attilus in Pado nertia pinguescens.’

Page 47 note 3 Cf. the final sentence of this article.

Page 48 note 1 For careful criticisms which led me to renounce a previously made transposition prompted by glutto I am indebted to my colleagues Professor J. F. Mountford and Mr. F. W. Walbank.