EMENDATIONS IN THE DIRAE AND THE LYDIA

Abstract

This article argues that the text of the Dirae and the Lydia is even more corrupt than current editions give reason to believe, and attempts to emend about a dozen passages.

The Dirae and the Lydia are among the most corrupt poems in the Appendix Vergiliana, and at the same time among the least favoured by commentators.¹ The only line-by-line commentary published in the twentieth century is to be found in van der Graaf's 1945 monograph; yet while the book offers a number of useful essays on the metre and style of the two poems, the commentary itself lacks detail and is extremely conservative in its treatment of textual issues.² Subsequent publications usually address individual cruces, but do not scrutinize the text in a more systematic manner.³ As a result, while a consensus exists that the poems are full of severely—sometimes irreparably—corrupt passages, the remaining superficially intact portions of the text tend to be accepted without questioning. To give just one example, all modern editions print Lydia 112 in its transmitted form o fortunati nimium multumque beati, despite the fact that multum after nimium is culpably anticlimactic and even though the correction nimiumque has been available since the Renaissance.⁴ It may appear unlikely that a scribe could miscopy a word that he had just copied correctly, but we should bear in mind that nimium and multum, having the exact same number of strokes, can in certain hands look almost indistinguishable.⁵ While the lack of critical attention to the textual problems of the Dirae and the Lydia can account to a large extent for such oversights, the situation is aggravated by the fact that the poems do not have a clear narrative frame that could provide either scribes or editors with some sort of control over the text. This can most clearly be seen in the case of the refrains, which both in sense and in syntax are detached from their immediate context and, as some of the following discussions attempt to show, are thus especially prone to be corrupted by scribes (and far less so to be corrected by editors). Without aiming at a comprehensive treatment, in what follows I mainly focus on identifying and solving problems that have been ignored in recent scholarship, while also hoping that the discussions will cumulatively have some weight in demonstrating that the text of the Dirae and the Lydia is even less certain than the available editions might let us believe.

DIRAE 14

In the first stanza of the curses proper (9–13) the speaker execrates his fields, pastures, orchards, vineyards, woods and streams; the second stanza (15–18) is a close repetition, with only slight variations, and it is introduced by a refrain that makes this explicit (14):⁶

rursus et hoc iterum repetamus, Battare, carmen.

A long-acknowledged problem is the apparent superfluity of either rursus or iterum at 14. In principle, ‘anew and again’ is not as such an impossible turn of phrase, and the majority of scholars seem to understand the line in this way. The intervening et hoc, however, makes such a construal rather strained: thus positioned (rursus et hoc iterum), et would normally go either with hoc (‘and this also’) or possibly with the clause as a whole (‘and let us repeat the song, anew again’), but neither option seems to make good sense here. Naeke ascribed to rursus an imperative force (‘once more! and let us repeat the song again’), but this is unwarranted.⁷ While the transmitted text may not be entirely unacceptable, it seems more likely that rursus et is an error for tristius, probably initiated by the omission of rubricated T; rıſtıuſ would then be read as rurſuſ, with et added subsequently to restore the metre.⁸ Thus emended (tristius hoc iterum repetamus), the refrain will become more similar to 54 (= 71) tristius hoc, memini, reuocasti, Battare, carmen ⁹ and 75 tristius hoc rursum dicit mea fistula carmen. We may note that in all these cases tristius occurs in a refrain introducing the repetition of the previous stanza, and arguably this second stanza can be seen to be phrased in more forceful terms; accordingly, tristius should be taken predicatively: ‘let us repeat this curse more grimly’.

DIRAE 24

The speaker aims lines 20–4 specifically at his grasslands:

haec Veneris uario florentia serta decore,

purpureo campos quae pingunt uerna colore

(hinc aurae dulces, hinc suauis spiritus agri),

mutent pestiferos aestus et taetra uenena;

dulcia non oculis, non auribus ulla ferantur.

There are some uncertainties throughout the passage,¹⁰ but the general sense seems clear: the plants growing on the meadow should no more produce fragrant flowers but should rather diffuse poisonous substances. Line 24 is intended to sum this up: as van der Graaf translates, ‘may nothing sweet ever reach eyes and ears’.¹¹ There are two potential difficulties here. First, until the present line the passage does not refer to sound, only to colour and smell: hence Heinsius's naribus for auribus, which editors mention even if they rarely accept it.¹² Second, as was likewise felt by Heinsius, the verb too may be inappropriate. As transmitted, the line can be construed in two ways: the datives oculis and auribus may depend on either the verb ferantur (literally ‘may move against the eyes and ears’) or the adjective dulcia (‘pleasant to the eyes and ears’). Neither construal, however, is convincing. The former requires for ferri a meaning that, as far as I can see, is unparalleled (‘to present itself to’). Taking the datives with the adjective is altogether preferable, but, again, interpreting the verb presents difficulties. One option is to take ferri to mean something like ‘to be borne through the air’: this might work for sounds (if reading auribus) or smells (if reading naribus), but hardly for what one sees, unless we imagine Lucretian simulacra. The alternative is to understand ferri as a synonym of gigni, and, as I suggest below, this is indeed the sense we need. However, while there is no lack of contexts of the type of Verg. Ecl. 4.38 feret omnia tellus, I am unable to parallel the reverse passive construction with ferri meaning ‘to be produced’ (with or without the ablative of agent); the idiom seems to be confined to the active voice.¹³ What can ferantur have replaced? Heinsius suggested two possible corrections: serantur, which is easy palaeographically but less than ideal in sense (to begin with, meadows do not need to be sown), and creentur, which gives a reasonable sense but fails to account for ferantur.¹⁴ I propose genantur: ‘may there grow nothing pleasant’.¹⁵ Incidentally, this will also favour Heinsius's naribus (plants can be pleasant to smell, but far less ordinarily so to listen to).¹⁶ The corruption will have begun with a scribe, unfamiliar with the rare form, changing genantur to gerantur (as at Lucr. 4.143 and 159), which would then mistakenly be corrected to ferantur.¹⁷

DIRAE 25 (= 47)

Above we discussed a refrain which announces that the following stanza is a repetition of the preceding one (14); now we come to consider a different refrain which, by contrast, signals a change of topic (it occurs twice, at 25 and 47):

sic precor, et nostris superent haec carmina uotis.

The line does not yield immediate sense. Naeke considers two options, but both are absurd: ‘let this song outlast my prayer’ (‘praestent efficaciam haec mea carmina tum quoque, quum mecum mea vota mortua erunt’) and ‘let this song exceed my prayer’ (‘Optat poeta ut plus praestet hoc carmen suum, quam ipse dicendo vovere possit’).¹⁸ Besides, while the former may be possible grammatically (OLD s.v. supero 7), the latter would require a different syntax (superare meaning ‘to surpass’ takes a direct object). Heinsius conjectured nostris superentur carmina uotis and nostri superent haec carmina uoti, but I fail to see how either is a plausible improvement.¹⁹ Mähly thus seems to be right that the problem lies in the verb, even if his own proposal, spirent, is hardly less objectionable than the paradosis.²⁰ Giardina's subeant is, I believe, a move in the right direction, as it finally makes sense of the juxtaposition of carmina and uotis: sic precor and nostris … uotis refer back to what precedes (note that both 24 dulcia non oculis, non naribus ulla genantur and 46 qua nostri fines olim, cinis omnia fiat are wishes), whereas haec carmina points forward to what follows (‘così io prego, e in aggiunta ai miei voti vengano questi versi, questa mia poesia’).²¹ In both cases the refrain in fact signals a change of theme: from meadows to woods at 25, and from a fire to a flood at 47. I suggest that Giardina's proposal can be improved upon by writing suberunt, which is slightly closer to the paradosis (for either corruption, compare the variant superant for suberant at Ov. Met. 10.593).²² More importantly, the future indicative would be more suitable to introduce a new stanza (compare perhaps 30 resonabit) than the jussive subjunctive (for hortative subjunctive, compare 1 and 14 repetamus, 2 canamus, 97 reuocemus, but jussive subjunctive in reference to the speaker's performance is unparalleled in the Dirae).²³

DIRAE 79

The speaker invites heavy rainfall to flood the estate (79–81):

cum delapsa meos agros peruenerit unda,

piscetur nostris in finibus aduena arator,

aduena, ciuili qui semper crimine creuit.

79 cum delapsa Reitzenstein: unde elapsa codd.

Line 79 delapsa … unda probably implies rainwater running down the mountains (compare 76) rather than falling down from the sky, and this could account for the point of peruenerit: ‘when the stream originating in the mountains has reached the valley’. The resulting picture, however, faces two objections. First, it presents the natural disaster destroying the speaker's estate as an evolving process, but this is not how the poet seems to imagine it elsewhere.²⁴ Second, if we do conceive of the flood in such dynamic terms, the transition between 79 and 80 appears somewhat abrupt: when the stream reaches the fields, it has yet to submerge them, before anyone could fish there. Both these points are given additional weight by the use of the prefixed form, which lays emphasis on the process accomplished rather than the resulting state achieved. While I admit that these objections may not make peruenerit quite impossible, it seems worth voicing an alternative: perfuderit, which finds a parallel in 51 spissa campos perfundat harena. The error will have been due to perfuderit being written right over aduena in the next line, resulting in the scribe's inadvertently replacing -fud- in perfuderit with -uen- from aduena.²⁵ The one potential objection could be that the same verb, with a different prefix, has already been used in this stanza at 76 (teneant diffuso gurgite campos), but the poet does not in fact avoid such repetition (in addition to 51 and 76, note 43 diffusis ignibus, 49 auras diffunditis agris, 63 tuas infundimus aures, 68 diffundite campis).

DIRAE 66

It has long been recognized that 66 is not at home in its transmitted context, and it has plausibly been suggested that the line originally belonged to the passage concluding the curses proper (82–5), though the exact place has been disputed (see below):

o male deuoti, praetorum crimina, agelli,

tuque inimica tui semper Discordia ciuis,

exsul ego indemnatus egens mea rura reliqui,

miles ut accipiat funesti praemia belli?

82 praetorum cod. Esc. T II 9: pratorum SL: parcarum M: raptorum Scaliger

Yet before we turn to reconsider the original position of 66, I propose to discuss briefly a well-known problem that affects the middle of 82. One branch of the manuscript tradition offers impossible pratorum (SL), which a manuscript descending from the same branch corrects to praetorum. This has been a popular solution, adopted among others by Kenney, but a crucial obstacle is the fact that praetors had nothing to do with the settling of the veterans.²⁶ Courtney has defended Parcarum of the other branch of the tradition (M), by adducing Stat. Achil. 2.45 indecores, fatorum crimina, cultus and Dracontius, Orest. 453 iners, Parcarum crimina, pastor.²⁷ In both these cases, however, there is a point in blaming either Fate (Achilles was hidden on Scyros to avoid his destined death at Troy) or the Parcae (Aegisthus was born of incest), whereas in our passage such a reference could only convey a general disappointment at how things have turned out. Ellis cites prauorum from the 1482 Zarotti edition, but it is too vague a term; Heinsius proposed praedonum, which is more specific but arguably too derogatory.²⁸ Scaliger's raptorum is, I suggest, a somewhat easier correction and more to the point.²⁹ There is a category of curse tablets known as ‘prayers for justice’, whose characteristic feature is that, rather than wantonly cursing their victims, they ask for divine retribution in quasi-legal terms.³⁰ A common subgroup are tablets that ‘devote’ stolen objects to deities, who are asked, as their new owners, not to let the thieves benefit from their illegally acquired property.³¹ This is the logic of 82: the speaker has ‘devoted’ (deuoti) his farmlands (to the underworld, as we shall see), because they have been unjustly taken away from him (raptorum crimina). This analysis of 82 can help us reconsider the long-standing problem of the original position of 66. It appears certain that 66 nil est quod perdam ulterius: merita omnia ditis (Kenney's text) does not belong in its transmitted place (on the one hand, it intrudes into a coherent passage; on the other, it has the air of a closural statement), but simply deleting it, as Kenney does, may not be the optimal solution.³² First, a few words are in order on the text of the line itself. Since he obelizes it, Kenney prints it as it appears in the manuscripts, but merita is difficult to construe; an easy and compelling correction is Putsche's merito.³³ It finds support in an interesting bilingual curse-tablet from Spain (first century b.c. – first century a.d.), which reads in part: τοῖς κατὰ ᾍδην δίδωμι παραδίδωμι Νεικίαν καὶ Τειμὴν καὶ τοὺς ἄ[λ]λους οἷς δικαίως κατηρασάμην (recto) – deuotos defixos inferis Timen et Niciam et ceteros quos merito deuoui supr[a (verso).³⁴ The point of merito (δικαίως) is that the inscriber has suffered injustice from Nicias and Time and now hands them over (παραδίδωμι) to the gods of the underworld as judges: the curse is not a wanton attempt to hurt but a request for just revenge. In our case it is not the perpetrators who are ‘devoted’ to the underworld, but what they unjustly took: the speaker cedes his property rights on the estate to Dis, who should now claim it as his own. This reading is also supported by perdam, a verb that is often used in ‘prayers for justice’ in reference to stolen possessions.³⁵ While lines 82–5, transitional between the curses proper and the final farewells, are as such a likely home for 66, the fact that both 82 and 66 play on the conventions of a ‘prayer for justice’ strengthens the case for a connection. Ribbeck placed 66 in front of 82, but, on the one hand, the vocatives of 82–3 are a good way to signal the beginning of a new section while, on the other, on its own 66 is not an effective summation of the preceding curses.³⁶ Goodyear moved it after 83, which is an improvement.³⁷ Yet after 85 is, I suggest, a more plausible place. On the one hand, making 66 answer the question of 84–5 brings out the logic of a ‘prayer for justice’ in a clearer way: ‘Have I parted with my farm, so that the soldier could have it as his own? Yes, everything has been taken from me, but it now all belongs to Dis.’ On the other, the similarity of the beginnings of 85 (miles) and 66 (nil est) could account for the latter's omission.

DIRAE 88

The speaker casts a last glance over his estate (86–8):

hinc ego de tumulo mea rura nouissima uisam,

hinc ibo in siluas: obstabunt iam mihi colles,

obstabunt montes, campos audire licebit.

As Goodyear points out, the second half of 88 can hardly be right: ‘The phrase as it stands is fatally ambiguous, able to mean either “the plains will be able to hear” or “it will be possible to hear the plains”, and no less fatally obscure.’³⁸ Earlier corrections—humanist campos nec adire, Putsche's campis nec abire, Sillig's campos haud ire, Diggle's campos laudare—fail to convince.³⁹ More recently, Watt has suggested camposque uidere negabunt, which appears to produce an apposite sense: ‘the mountains will not let me see the plains’.⁴⁰ As he points out, the confusion between forms of audire and uidere is widespread, and the change of negabunt to licebit can also be paralleled. The one weakness of Watt's proposal is that, with an infinitive, negare means not ‘to forbid to’ but ‘to refuse to’ (OLD s.v. nego 4). To obtain the required sense, we should adopt Watt's camposque uidere but write uetabunt instead of negabunt.⁴¹ The corruption of uetabunt to licebit may be due to the scribe's eye inadvertently jumping down to licebit at the end of 103.

DIRAE 97

The final stanza of the Dirae is introduced by the following refrain (97):

extremum carmen reuocemus, Battare, auena.

At first sight it appears unobjectionable, but in fact it has two potential problems. One is that bare auena at the end of the line is weak; it has the feel of an afterthought or even a mere metrical filler (contrast 14 or 54 [= 71], which lack such an instrumental ablative). Heinsius proposed changing extremum to extrema: this improves the syntax, but the harsh metonymy extrema auena for ‘my last playing on the panpipe made from reeds’ does not appeal.⁴² There is, in fact, a further irregularity, even if on its own it may not be objectionable: elsewhere in the poem, the form carmen usually occurs in the sixth foot (14, 30, 54, 71, 75; line 19 is the one exception, which is suspect also for other reasons) and is usually preceded by Battare in the fifth (except at 75). Herrmann therefore had a point when he proposed swapping carmen and auena; since, however, auena between extremum and reuocemus violates the metre, we have to ask what else can have stood there.⁴³ As 14 and 54 (= 71) suggest, that would be a good place for an adverb; I have considered borrowing iterum from these refrains, but it has two weaknesses: on the one hand, it would make the corruption to carmen somewhat less likely; on the other, extra emphasis on the idea of repetition may be less welcome at the close of the poem. I suggest that the adverb we need is tandem: it is reasonably similar to carmen in both shape and sound (the corruption will, of course, have been influenced by carmen at the end of the line), and it appears appropriate in a refrain introducing the final stanza. The second problem is indicated by the fact that all other refrains that refer to the following stanza with carmen (carmina) define it with hoc (haec): 14 tristius hoc iterum repetamus, Battare, carmen, 25 (= 47) sic precor, et nostris suberunt haec carmina uotis, 30 hoc ⁴⁴ mihi saepe meum resonabit, Battare, carmen, 54 (= 71) tristius hoc iterum reuocasti, Battare, carmen, 75 tristius hoc rursum dicit mea fistula carmen. We may also note that the refrains containing the idea of repetition (14, 54, 71, 75) imply specifically the repetition of the preceding stanza. What does the final refrain mean? Without the deictic hoc referring to what follows, extremum carmen can most naturally be interpreted as ‘the conclusion of the song’; while this is not in itself an implausible meaning, the point of reuocemus is lost: ‘let us repeat the end of the song’ makes no sense, because the end of the song has not yet been performed. I suggest that we should restore hoc here as well: extremum hoc tandem reuocemus, Battare, carmen, ‘Battarus, let us at last repeat this stanza as the final one’;⁴⁵ the implication will then be that 98–101 reiterate, as in fact they do, 4–8.

LYDIA 107–8, 109–10

The speaker of the Lydia envies the fields and meadows in which he used to spend time with his girlfriend, but which now have her company to themselves (107–10):

uos nunc illa uidet, uobis mea Lydia ludit,

uos nunc alloquitur, uos nunc arridet ocellis,

et mea submissa meditatur carmina uoce,

cantat et interea, mihi quae cantabat in aurem.

An overlooked difficulty concerns the sense and construal of 107 uobis mea Lydia ludit: what case is uobis, and what does ludit mean? Van der Graaf translates: ‘my Lydia plays with you’; and explains in the commentary: ‘Lydia's play is specified in 114, 117, etc. (cf. Catullus’ second poem).’⁴⁶ This translation, however, confuses two different senses of the English construction, ‘to play with a friend’ and ‘to play with a toy’: in a context such as this we expect the former, but the Latin (ablative without cum) can only convey the latter. In his revision of Fairclough's Loeb, Goold translates: ‘in you my Lydia plays’; but a locative interpretation of uobis is likewise inapposite, since the fields and meadows addressed here are virtually personified (besides, it is doubtful that the ablative of a pronoun can have a locative sense).⁴⁷ Before proposing an alternative construal, I wish to call attention to another potential cause for concern: there seems to be no logic in the order of the activities listed in 107–8 (107a uidet, 107b ludit, 108a alloquitur, 108b arridet). In and of itself, this may not be a sufficient reason for intervention; but if we swap the second hemistichs of 107 and 108, by way of an experiment, the advantages of the new arrangement are obvious. First, the triple anaphora of uos nunc is now uninterrupted. Second, the progression of ideas from 107a uidet (‘she sees you’) to 108b arridet ocellis (‘she smilingly looks at you’) to 108a alloquitur (‘she speaks to you’) obtains a clear logic (I stop at 108a for the moment). And third, the new position of 107b finally enables us to construe the phrase in a way that makes sense. Placed between alloquitur and meditatur (and cantat), ludit can likewise be taken to refer to verbal/vocal performance, with uobis being a dative: ‘my Lydia plays/performs for you’; what Lydia performs is explained in 109–10. Turning back to an earlier point, we can now take the climactic progression of ideas one step further: she admires you, she smiles at you, she speaks to you—and she sings for you.⁴⁸ The corruption is probably due to homoearchon: having copied the first hemistich of the first line, the scribe would jump down to the second hemistich of the second line; he would then add the omitted hemistichs in the margins, but the subsequent copyist would fail to restore them in their original place.

As we have established, 109–10 are intended to explicate 107b uobis mea Lydia ludit, but they involve some difficulties too. First, 109 appears to refer to Lydia's repeating the songs which the speaker used to sing to her, but there are reasons to doubt this interpretation. On the one hand, though less crucially, these carmina would most naturally be love songs addressed to Lydia, and it will be odd to imagine her repeating them to herself. On the other, meditatur should normally mean ‘to compose, rehearse’, and the same idea seems to be implied by submissa … uoce (Lydia does not sing these songs aloud, because they are not ready yet); this suggests that carmina should be Lydia's own.⁴⁹ While in principle it could make sense for 109 and 110 to refer to Lydia's singing her lover's and her own songs in turn, the contrast may in fact be between polishing new songs (109) and performing old ones (110).⁵⁰ We may thus provisionally mark mea as suspect (it could be a reflex of mea in 107b). A second difficulty concerns the articulation of the two lines as a whole; we could expect them to be saying that Lydia meditatur and cantat in turn, but, as it stands, the passage cannot be construed in this way. A glaring problem is 110 interea ‘in the meantime’, which makes no plausible sense in the context and for which Wagner's interdum is a compelling correction.⁵¹ While interdum ‘sometimes’ is clearly a fitting word for our context, on its own it may not be sufficient to restore a plausible text. On the one hand, the articulation of the passage would be clearer if the first clause were likewise introduced by interdum or a synonym, so as to establish a bipartite interdum … interdum construction, even though this may not be strictly necessary. Writing nunc for et at 109 might be a possibility,⁵² but it would clash with the repeated nunc in 107–8, where it has a temporal force (compare 124 et uobis nunc est mea quae fuit ante uoluptas); writing modo for mea—which, as argued above, is also suspect for another reason—seems a better option.⁵³ On the other hand, as part of a bipartite construction meaning ‘now … now’, interdum introducing the second clause cannot be preceded by et; besides, its normal position would be at the very head of its clause.⁵⁴ This suggests that we should write interdum cantat; the error is probably due to the omission of cantat, which was subsequently restored in the wrong place (with et added to fix the metre).

LYDIA 115–16

The speaker envies the farmlands in which Lydia will walk (114–17) –

aut roseis uiridem digitis decerpserit uuam

(dulci namque tumet nondum uitecula Baccho)

aut inter uarios, Veneris stipendia, flores

membra reclinarit teneramque illiserit herbam.

116 ueneris recc.: uenerem MSL | stipendia SL: spumantia M

A long-recognized problem concerns the middle of 116: while it seems virtually certain that between uarios and flores we should have an appositional phrase comparable to Columella 10.96 uarios, terrestria sidera, flores and that, accordingly, Veneris is probably right, stipendia has duly been suspected. The term is markedly ‘unpoetisch’: other than in Plautus and until Prudentius, it only occurs three times in poetry: Ennius (Ann. 215 Poeni stipendia pendunt) and Catullus (64.173 dira ferens stipendia tauro) use it as a technical term for either ‘soldiers’ wages’ or ‘war reparations’ (respectively); Horace (Epod. 17.36 quod me manet stipendium?) gives it a less precise sense (‘fine’), but its down-to-earth flavour is clearly what he is after.⁵⁵ In our context the term is problematic at least on two counts: first, it does not fit stylistically; second, the exact literal sense underlying the metaphor of Veneris stipendia is not clear (‘wages paid to Venus’? ‘tax levied in Venus’ interest’?).⁵⁶ If that were not enough, stipendia is, in fact, only the reading of one branch of the manuscript tradition (SL). Building on M's spumantia, some scholars have attempted to restore a participial phrase in agreement with 117 membra (such as Venerem spirantia Eichstädt, simulantia Sillig); but this results in a rather awkward syntax.⁵⁷ As noted above, it seems clear that we need a noun, and Shackleton Bailey proposed spiracula (‘Venus breathes through the flowers, causing their fragrance’): this is absurd, but points in the right direction.⁵⁸ I suggest that we should write spectacula, ‘Venus’ show’; the underlying image is that of spring as a festival held by, or in honour of, Venus.⁵⁹

Once we have restored spectacula, the jingle with uitecula (directly above it), though not quite impossible, becomes a cause for concern.⁶⁰ There are two further reasons to suspect uitecula, even if neither constitutes a decisive objection. First, the diminutive uiticula is not used in classical verse, and is quite rare in prose too.⁶¹ Second, the metonymy is rather harsh (‘the vine swells with juice’).⁶² I tentatively suggest that uitecula is an error for uindemia: written exactly over (specta)cula, (uīde)mia could easily produce (uite)cula;⁶³ for tumet uindemia, compare Auson. Mos. 195 uindemia turget. This conjecture may not be necessary in the sense that it fixes an unquestionably corrupt text, but it is fairly easy and simultaneously solves all the issues (admittedly minor): it removes the unattractive jingle (if spectacula is right); eliminates a conspicuous lexical rarity; and replaces the unparalleled metonymy with a standard one (‘ripe grapes do not yet swell with sweet wine’).

LYDIA 121

The speaker then describes the enjoyment which Lydia's company brings his estate in his absence (119–22):

gaudebunt siluae, gaudebunt mollia prata

et gelidi fontes, auiumque silentia fient,

tardabunt riui †labentes currite lymphae,

dum mea iucundas exponat cura querelas.

Kenney obelized a portion of 121 not because no correction could be found, but because it was uncertain which correction should be adopted.⁶⁴ Some scholars have in fact accepted the paradosis, taking labentes currite lymphae as a parenthesis and suggesting that labi means here something like ‘to flow gently, quietly’.⁶⁵ Yet this is far-fetched: it is quite doubtful that labentes can have this pregnant sense, and the Orphic topos requires that the rivers stop their flow rather than merely reducing its violence. It seems thus more or less certain that the imperative currite is corrupt, and one solution has been to change it to sistite (humanist). This brings us to a more general objection: a parenthetic apostrophe is out of place here. To begin with, the speaker is separated from the situation he is describing both spatially and temporally: it will happen in the future, and in a place which he has left. It is true that the entire first part of the Lydia is addressed to the abandoned farmlands, but the speaker never implies that they can actually hear him; an imperative does involve such an expectation. Perhaps more importantly, the imperative currite will jar with the future indicative tardabunt: an assertion should not depend on the fulfilment of a command. This is not merely a linguistic issue: the point of the passage is that the rivers, enchanted by Lydia's singing, will stop flowing of their own accord, not in response to the speaker's request. The likeliest correction for currite seems therefore to be currere of the 1534 Aldine edition, to be construed with tardabunt. With this change, the line can in principle make sense: ‘the flowing waters of the river will stop to run’. Yet both the general sense and the context (note 119 gaudebunt siluae) suggest that it would be preferable to have riui as the subject, and Scaliger proposed turning labentes … lymphae into an ablative: tardabunt riui labenti currere lympha, ‘the rivers will stop to run with their flowing water’.⁶⁶ Again, this is not impossible, but one cannot avoid the feeling that the expression is vague and wordy. I suggest that we need the accusative: tardabunt riui labentes currere lymphas, ‘the rivers will make their flowing waters stop their course’.⁶⁷ This has the advantage of giving both riui and lymphae a clear role to play, which moreover can be paralleled in the Dirae: note especially 67 flectite currentes lymphas, uaga flumina, retro, but also 48 undae, quae uestris pulsatis litora lymphis, where similarly ‘streams’ (flumina) and ‘waves’ (undae) appear as active agents which have control over their ‘waters’ (lymphas/lymphis).⁶⁸

LYDIA 175

After the references to Jupiter's premarital affair with Juno (166–8) and to Venus’ affair with virginal Adonis (169–74), Aurora is added to the list of divine seducers (175–6):

non Aurora nouos etiam plorauit amores

atque rubens oculos roseo celauit amictu?

Although it is true that she eventually lost her lovers Orion, Cephalus and Clitus, in one way or another, the idea that ‘Aurora was unhappy in love’ (suggested by plorauit) seems out of place here.⁶⁹ Hiding one's eyes is a gesture of shame (note also rubens, ‘blushing’), and while in principle the implication could be that Aurora was ashamed of crying (compare Stat. Achil. 1.233–4 udaque celat | lumina), this would give too much prominence to an action that could only indicate her affairs in the most indirect way, if at all. The most natural reason for Aurora's feeling of shame would be her indecorous behaviour, an idea which plorauit can hardly imply. A passage from Ovid provides an illuminating parallel (Ars am. 3.83–4):

Latmius Endymion non est tibi, Luna, rubori,

nec Cephalus roseae praeda pudenda deae.

Ovid playfully denies that Luna's and Aurora's ‘blushing’—the rising moon can be reddish, and so is dawn—was caused by their affairs with mortal lovers; the idea rejected by Ovid must be implied in the Lydia.⁷⁰ What can plorauit be concealing? One possibility is to assume that the line should refer to Aurora's enjoying her relationships with men other than her husband, and gustauit or libauit could convey such a sense (compare 168 gaudia libauit dulcem furatus amorem). This may not be entirely impossible, but the context suggests that the passage should be making a different point: not that Aurora was unfaithful to Tithonus, but that she seduced unexperienced young men.⁷¹ I have thought of uiolauit, yet while uiolare can in principle imply rape, with amores it would more naturally mean ‘to betray love’ than ‘to seduce a lover’. I suggest that raptauit would be a more suitable term, for which compare Ov. Her. 15.87–8 hunc ne pro Cephalo raperes, Aurora, timebam, | et faceres, sed te prima rapina tenet, Eur. Hipp. 454–5 ἀνήρπασέν ποτε | ἡ καλλιφεγγὴς Κέφαλον ἐς θεοὺς Ἕως.⁷² While Cephalus may well be implied here in the first place, the vagueness of nouos … amores, as well as the frequentative raptauit, could hint that this was not an isolated occasion and other young men had likewise been abducted by Aurora.⁷³ One difficulty remains: the point of etiam should be ‘did not Aurora too?’ (that is, as well as the other deities mentioned earlier), but positioned between nouos and raptauit it can more naturally be construed with either of them. A conceivable option would be to write nonne nouos Aurora etiam, but the elision at the penthemimeres does not appeal. I tentatively propose replacing etiam with totiens instead, which will make Aurora a suitable capping for Jupiter and Venus; for the idea, we may compare ps.-Apollodorus’ report that, after Eos slept with Ares, Aphrodite in revenge made her repeatedly fall in love with men one after the other (1.27 ἐποίει γὰρ αὐτὴν Ἀφροδίτη συνεχῶς ἐρᾶν, ὅτι Ἄρει συνευνάσθη).⁷⁴