nec iuvenis sororis suae mortem tam miseram et quae minime par erat inlatam aequo tolerare quivit animo, sed … exin flagrantissimis febribus ardebat, ut ipsi quoque iam medela videretur esse necessaria.
This is the text of the passage describing the reaction of the young man at the news that his beloved sister has been murdered flagris and titione candenti inter media femina detruso as it is transmitted by the Florentine MS (F).Footnote 1 With the few exceptions which I discuss below, the vast majority of editors accept the text of F, betraying resignation before a paradosis that can hardly seem genuine, since it can be maintained only by forcing both word order and syntax. Editors either refer quae to mortem, assuming an ellipsis of ei (i.e. sorori) in the relative clause and taking par as ‘fitting’,Footnote 2 or refer quae to soror, assuming an ellipsis of in eam (i.e. et in eam … inlatam) and taking par as equivalent to digna.Footnote 3
Attempts to restore the text, which date as far back as the fifteenth century, have focused mostly on emending the problematic quae and have more persuasively taken the phrase par erat to mean ‘it was fair’.Footnote 4 Of the many suggestions listed by Oudendorp (1.726), only qua, found in the recentiores and adopted by Robertson, is worth mentioning. In our context, qua should be interpreted qua ratione (Hildebrand), although it lends itself to misinterpretation (quo loco, as Oudendorp prefers). The arrangement et quae <ut> minime par erat inlata[m] <est>, printed by Bussi in the editio princeps and adopted by Zimmerman in the latest edition of the Metamorphoses, would make good sense (ut … erat is a clause of manner), but is questionable from both a methodological and a syntactic point of view, as it requires too many interventions and involves the addition of a perfect tense (inlata est) which is difficult in the context. Therefore, the safest way to print the sentence would seem to demand the obelizing of quae, as in Nicolini's recent text.Footnote 5
I now put forward a new proposal which would restore an excellent meaning through a barely perceptible change. I suggest reading utque instead of et quae and thus translating the sentence: ‘… a death so pitiful and inflicted in a way that was the most unfair’. Such a position of que, which joins miseram and inlatam, is quite common: compare, for example, Apuleius Met. 1.23.1: et cum dicto iubet uxorem decedere utque in eius locum adsidam iubet; and 5.2.1: Psyche … altrinsecus aedium horrea sublimi fabrica perfecta magnisque congesta gazis conspicit. The well-known similarity between ut and et, and between quae and que, in manuscripts allows me to pass over palaeographical matters.
