I have transcribed this portion of Sinon’s speech from the second edition of Conte’s Teubner.Footnote ¹ The purpose of this note is to argue for paret, a conjecture published by Madvig in 1873.Footnote ² The problem it addresses is that most take fata as the subject of the verb. This leaves transmitted parent without an object although it is prima facie transitive. The Loeb translationFootnote ³ reads: ‘For whom is fate preparing this doom? Whom does Apollo claim?’, but to make fata function as both subject and object is obviously impossible. It is this lack of an object that Madvig’s conjecture addresses. I will set out the substantial case in its favour and also answer some ineffective defences.

Here is the argument in favour of paret: fata becomes object, not subject, of the verb, and the meaning it has as object is precisely the meaning the Loeb translation calls for, ‘doom’. For fatum as a synonym for ‘death’, see OLD s.v. 6 and add Aen. 4.20 and 12.507, both of these employing the plural. For the precise collocation fata parare alicui, ‘to prepare death for someone’, see Ov. Met. 14.213 talia fingebam misero mihi fata parari, Valerius Flaccus 1.649 miseris tu gentibus, Argo, fata paras, and Stat. Theb. 5.714 mirandaque fata parabas. The corruption arose from the commonest of causes, the influence of a neighbouring word. fata occurs often in the Aeneid as the subject of verbs (more than thirty times, twice in the phrase fata uiam inuenient), and it is entirely natural that a scribe should unconsciously alter paret to parent in order to make fata its subject. Once we have undone his work, the meaning of the passage clear: ‘When this utterance came to the ears of the crowd, their hearts were dazed, and a cold shudder ran through their inmost marrow (as they asked themselves) to whom it [sc. this utterance] was bringing death, whom Apollo was claiming as victim’ (or ‘to whom Apollo was bringing death, whom he was claiming as victim’).

Three defences of parent must be mentioned. One, that of Forbiger,Footnote ⁴ cites a passage that is supposed to show that the lack of an object for parent is normal, although it shows no such thing. He says that pararem in [Quint.] Decl. 17.5 also lacks an object. But there the speaker, who had been about to do away with himself by poison when interrupted by his father, reports that the latter wanted to know quid tererem, cui pararem, ‘what I was grinding up, for whom I was preparing it’. The object of pararem, though implicit, is clear. The defence fails.

AustinFootnote ⁵ takes the same line but dispenses with parallels entirely: ‘The lack of an expressed object to parent … is no real difficulty, and makes the picture more sinister: the Greeks shiver as they wonder for whom the oracle is “making preparations”.’ But parare is a transitive verb, and an editor who wishes to treat it here as intransitive has an obligation, I suggest, to produce other passages that are plausible parallels.Footnote ⁶

A third line of defence is not as obviously wrong as these two. This treats parent as a deliberative question with ‘the Greeks’ as its subject: ‘for whom they were to prepare death’. Madvig, however, notes ‘neque Graecis tremor per ossa currebat, cogitantibus, cui ipsi mortem parare deberent, nec, qui dei iussu aliquem occidere coguntur, fata ei parare recte dicuntur. omnis est cogitatio de oraculi sensu deique consilio …’. For the sake of clarity I paraphrase Madvig’s objections. (1) The extreme emotion of cold shudders running through the body is more likely to be felt by people who are contemplating that they themselves may be the victim than by people worrying about others they may be required to kill. (2) The verb parare suggest something undertaken voluntarily, not under duress. (3) The emphasis of the description is on the god’s demands, represented by quae uox or Apollo, not on the actions of those the god is addressing.

A further point in Madvig’s favour is the contribution his cui fata paret makes to the characterization of Sinon. Consider how emphasizing the fear of the hearers that they might be sacrificed helps to reinforce the way Sinon presents himself in the rest of the speech. In 124–5 he says that people were telling him that he was the target of the prophecy:

In 130–1 he describes the relief felt by the others that their throats were not going to be cut:

In 132–3 the fatal day comes, with the full horror of being sacrificed:

where note that mihi sacra parari uses the same verb plus dative that we find in cui fata paret. And in 139–40 he imagines that his family will be sacrificed in his stead after his escape:

These are all, like Madvig’s text of 121, written from the point of view of someone worried that he may be the victim. By contrast, the image of people worrying about others they might have to sacrifice contributes much less to Sinon’s rhetorical purpose.

Madvig’s conjecture solves a genuine problem, and defences of the transmitted text are either wholly inadequate or not fully satisfactory. Why do so few editors even mention this conjecture? Editors of Virgil are perhaps lulled into a false sense of security by their good fortune: they have manuscripts in rustic capitals dating from the fourth to sixth century of our era, and the early date of these confers the presumption that their witness will not often need to be corrected by later manuscripts or by conjecture. But it is illegitimate to conclude that because these manuscripts are comparatively error-free, they deserve our trust at all times. There are several places where the truth is preserved elsewhere or has been recovered by conjecture.Footnote ⁷ Where a conjecture addresses a real problem (as Madvig’s does), and the postulated corruption can be easily explained, it is irrational to prefer violent construal to the gentle medicine of a small and easily justified alteration.Footnote ⁸

This conjecture has, at the very least, earned the right to a place at the bottom of the page. I believe that the case for promoting it to the text is strong.