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Sane in Vergil and Ovid: an unpoetisches Wort revisited
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 11 February 2009
Extract
In his influential work Unpoetische Wörter, B. Axelson mentions sane as one of the words used freely in prose but generally avoided in verse.1 He briefly discusses its occurrences in poetry. A closer look at these occurrences offers some insight into the manner in which Roman poets employed words usually associated with prose writing or everyday speech, while raising some interesting questions about the accepted text of a passage in the Aeneid and the style of Ovid's Heroides 16–21.
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References
1 Unpoetische Wörter (Lund, 1945), pp. 94, 138.
2 Juvenal 1.42; 4.16; 5.123; 9.46; 10.183; 12.124; 15.44; 15.61; Martial 3.1.5; 4.78.9; 5.15.6, 61.8, 84,9; 6.32.5; 8.51.1; 9.47.4; 10.21.5.
3 Serm. 2.3.138; Ep. 1.7.61; 15.5; 2.1.206; 2.2.64, 132. A. P. 206,418.
4 Aen. 10.48.
5 A total of 13 times evenly distributed throughout the corpus.
6 Catullus 10.4; 43.4; Silvae 4.9.1 (Axelson was unaware of this occurrence); Heroides 17.13, 21.213 (the line numbering used is the traditional one as found in the Showerman/Goold edition).
7 Quinn describes the style of Catullus′ short poems (which are mostly hendecasyllablic) as standing ‘halfway between that of Plautus and that of the Satires of Horace … the Latin of conversation, improved upon’.
8 Statius and Catullus 43.
9 In the introduction to his commentary (Oxford, 1961) on this poem, p. 116.
10 Unpöetische Worter, p. 94.
11 The gloss is valde, which, as Heyne observes, is incorrect.
12 In his commentary on Aeneid 10 (Oxford, 1991).
13 Granted, the placing of hunc helps convey an opposition.
14 The editors have drawn my attention to a similar case: Prop. 2.34.64 and Aen. 1.2–3.
15 Vergil's own metrical practice is of no help in this matter. A search through the Aeneid yields inconclusive evidence. The combination molossus I pyrrhic I molossus opens a line seven times, but so does molossus I elided spondee I molossus. Occurrences of the former are found at 1.581; 2.222; 5.127; 6.99,831; 8.405; 9.255; of the latter at 2.616; 5.133,714; 7.380; 8.234; 10.48;11.605.
16 The occurrence at 21.213 belongs to a section of the work (21.145–248) transmitted by a single source, π. Some believe this passage and another transmitted only by π (16.39–144) to be interpolations (cf. M. D. Reeve, CQ 23 (1973), 334–8; for a defence of their place in the text cf. E. J. Kenney, CQ 29 (1979), 394–431). Furthermore, a few editors have chosen to emend this sane. Heinsius conjectured anne ut, which Kenny adopts (cf. Heroides XVI–XXI, edited by E. J. Kenney (Cambridge, 1996), p. 242). In light of the occurrence at 17.13, emendation here seems unnecessary (Kenney would have been wiser to apply his argument against sane's well attested variant at Aen. 10.48 to Heinsius′ conjecture here. Cf. ibid. p. 248). But if the occurrence at Her. 21.213 is eliminated, it could be argued that the hapaxlegomena at Her. 17.13 and Aen. 10.48 support each other.
17 Or fourteen. The Epistula Sapphus (Her. 15) has been often impugned as non-Ovidian, most recently by Tarrant, R. J., HSCPh 85 (1981), 133–153Google Scholar and Knox, , Heroides: select epistles, edited by P. E. Knox (Cambridge, 1995), pp. 13–14.Google Scholar
18 Clark, Cf. S. B., HSCPh 19 (1908), 121–155. For some examples cf. below n. 19.Google Scholar
19 E.g. ending pentameters with polysyllabic words. This happens at Fasti 5.582; 6.660; Her. 16.290; 17.16; 19.202; and often in the Tristia and Ex Ponto. In the late elegies Ovid does not as rigorously avoid hexameter endings of the type discordia taetra, a noun ending in a short a followed by its epithet with the same ending. There are two cases in pre-exile elegy (not counting Her. 16–21) and one in the Metamorphoses. In the Tristia and Ex Ponto there are seven such endings. There are four in the double epistles (cf. N. Holmes, CQ 45 (1995), 500–3. This count is based on the standard text, which could be challenged in two of the cases).
20 16.50, 17.169, 19.127.
21 Horace, Ser. 2.6.67, and Ausonius, Mosella 372, are the only other cases. It should be added that some have suggested emending the occurrence in the Heroides (cf. E. Fisher, HSCPh 74 (1970), 193–205).
22 Together these works contain more than four times as much text (6,724 lines) as the double letters (1,564).
23 Courtney, E., BICS 12 (1965), 63–66 (a rather more extensively argued case based on the chronology of the polysyllabic pentameter endings)Google Scholar; Goold, G. P., Gnomon 46 (1974), 484Google Scholar; Tarrant, R. J., HSCPh 85 (1981), 152 n. 39Google Scholar; Holmes, N., CQ 45 (1995), 502 (Courtney, Goold, and Tarrant also question the authorship of some of the single Heroides). Kenney (in the introduction to his edition, pp. 20–26) defends their Ovidian authorship with a vigour reminiscent of earlier discussions of the issue.CrossRefGoogle Scholar