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Cornelia and Dido (Lucan 9.174–9)

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  11 February 2009

David P. Kubiak
David P. Kubiak
Affiliation:
Wabash College, Indiana
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Extract

Pompey has been treacherously killed, his body decapitated and thrown into the surf. The faithful Cornelia cannot give her husband a proper funeral, but must be content to place on the pyre all that is left of his greatness. Commentators are not of much help in this place, most caught up in tralatician glossing and hence content to echo the scholiastic reference to Pompey's three triumphs. Thomas Farnaby thought of the funeral of Misenus in Aeneid 6; but one looks in vain to Grotius (1639), Oudendorp (1728), Burman (1740), Bentley (1760), Weber (1828–9), Francken (1896–7), Heitland-Haskins (1889), Housman (1926), Bourgery-Ponchont (1947), and Luck (1985) for the most important parallel, which is to Dido in Aeneid. I adduce the passages Heinze well described as examples of ‘das Idealbild eines heroischen Weibes’:

tu secreta pyram tecto interiore sub auras

erige, et arma uiri thalamo quae fixa reliquit

impius exuuiasque omnis lectumque iugalem,

quo perii, super imponas:

494–7) super exuuias ensemque relictum

effigiemque toro locat haud ignata futuri.

(507–8)hie, postquam Iliacas uestis notumque cubile

conspexit, paulum lacrimis et mente morata

incubuitque toro dixitque nouissima uerba:

‘dulces exuuiae…’

Information

Type
Shorter Notes
Information
The Classical Quarterly , Volume 40 , Issue 2 , December 1990, pp. 577 - 578
Copyright
Copyright © The Classical Association 1990

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References

1 The text is Bailey, D. R. Shackleton, Lucanus, De Bello Civili (Leipzig, 1988)Google Scholar.

2 Adnotationes super Lucanum, Endt, J., ed. (Leipzig, 1909) ad 9.178Google Scholar: ‘ter enim constat triumphasse Pompeium, ut Paterculus scribit II 40, 4 dicens “huius viri fastigium tantis actibus fortuna extulit, ut primum ex Africa, iterum ex Europa, tertio ex Hispania triumpharet et, quot partes terrae sunt, totidem faceret monumenta victoriae suae.”’

3 M. Annaei Lucani Pharsalia, Sive, De Bello Civili Caesaris et Pompei Libri X (London, 1618) ad 9.115Google Scholar: ‘Efferebantur illustres viri apud Romam in pompam funebrem, conspicui insignibus honorum quos gessissent. In imaginaria hac sepultura Pompeio suo hunc honorem praestat Cornelia. Illustrium item virorum bustis iniecta atque una cremata fuisse arma, et quae illis in vita fuerant clarissima, docet Virg. in funere Miseni, Aen. 6.’

4 The Classical Epic Tradition (Wisconsin, 1986), p. 181Google Scholar. Pease, A. S., P. Vergili Maronis Aeneidos Liber Quartus (Harvard, 1935Google Scholar; rep. Darmstadt, 1967), pp. 410–11 is predictably thorough; R. G. Austin in his commentary (Oxford, 1963), pp. 496–7 emphasizes the personal quality of Dido's ‘exuviae’. See in addition Penquitt, E., De Didonis Vergilianae Exitu (Diss. Königsberg, 1910), pp. 42–4Google Scholar.

5 See Johnson, W. R., Momentary Monsters: Lucan and His Heroes (Cornell, 1987), p. 84Google Scholar: ‘She [Cornelia] has read Aeneid 4 once too often’; rightly contra Bruére, R. T., ‘Lucan's Cornelia’, CP 46 (1951), 221–36, p. 232Google Scholar: ‘…(the echoes of Virgil's Dido are fleeting and superficial)…'. As far as I am aware Lucan and Virgil are brought together only at TLL 52.2132.19–28.

6 It is absent from the fragments of Ennius, but cf. Aen. 2.275, 473, 646; 4.496, 507, 651; 9.307; 10.423; 11.7, 577, 790; 12.946; Stat. Theb. 1.490; 2.726; 4.155, 333; 6.67, 350; 7.55; 8.589; 9.563, 592; 10.337, 411. Note also the martial and archaic context of Prop. 4.10.5–6: ‘imbuis exemplum primae tu, Romule, palmae/huius, et exuvio plenus ab hoste redis’, where the singular is unique in classical Latin. This is the usage that provides the elegant humour of Cat. 66.14 and 62.

7 am indebted to Professor M. P. O. Morford and the Editors for their comments on a draft of this note.