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CIRIS 265: AN EMENDATION

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  13 November 2018

Boris Kayachev
Boris Kayachev*
Affiliation:
Trinity College, Dublin
*
boriskayachev@gmail.com
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Extract

Carme fears that Scylla is in love with her own father (237–40); Scylla replies that she loves no one she should love, but one of the besiegers—though she can hardly bring herself to utter his name (262–7):

      nil amat hic animus, nutrix, quod oportet amari,
      in quo falsa tamen lateat pietatis imago,
      sed media ex acie, mediis ex hostibus—eheu,
      quid dicam quoue aegra malum hoc exordiar ore?        265
      dicam equidem, quoniam tu nunc non dicere, nutrix,
      non sinis: extremum hoc munus morientis habeto.
      265 aegra Baehrens: agam Z: ipsa ρ: ausa Sillig

Information

Type
Shorter Notes
Information
The Classical Quarterly , Volume 68 , Issue 2 , December 2018 , pp. 728 - 730
Copyright
Copyright © The Classical Association 2018 

Carme fears that Scylla is in love with her own father (237–40); Scylla replies that she loves no one she should love, but one of the besiegers—though she can hardly bring herself to utter his name (262–7):

nil amat hic animus, nutrix, quod oportet amari,
in quo falsa tamen lateat pietatis imago,
sed media ex acie, mediis ex hostibus—eheu,
quid dicam quoue aegra malum hoc exordiar ore?        265
dicam equidem, quoniam tu nunc non dicere, nutrix,
non sinis: extremum hoc munus morientis habeto.Footnote 1
265 aegra Baehrens: agam Z: ipsa ρ: ausa Sillig

Line 265 has one obvious textual problem: Z's agam is impossible, ρ’s ipsa gives poor sense and is either a conjecture or an independent corruption. Most editors, including Lyne, accept Baehrens's aegra.Footnote 2 Sillig's ausa seems in fact preferable (it may even find some support in ρ’s ipsa):Footnote 3 note Verg. Aen. 4.283–4 (heu quid agat? quo nunc reginam ambire furentem | audeat adfatu? quae prima exordia sumat?), which Lyne aptly adduces.Footnote 4 Another point worth making is that quo ore? should be taken to mean not ‘with what words?’Footnote 5 but ‘with what face?’.Footnote 6 This is the idiomatic sense in which quo ore? appears in Cicero (for instance Verr. 2.4.26 in populi Romani quidem conspectum quo ore uos commisistis?), in Livy (for instance 40.27.11 quo ore quisquam uestrum … occurret … iis qui …?) and, perhaps most relevantly, in Terence: Phorm. 916 (nam quo redibo ore ad eam quam contempserim?), 1041 (quo ore illum obiurgabis?) and Haut. 700 (nam quo ore appellabo patrem?). The rhetorical question evidently implies a negative answer: Scylla does not have the face (= is ashamed) to tell Carme the truth.Footnote 7 In English, the idiom can perhaps be rendered as ‘how shall I face you, look you in the eye?’. This sense goes well with Sillig's ausa: ‘how dare I look you in the eye and tell you of this disaster?’.

There is, however, also a second problem, for quid dicam?—‘what shall I say?’—gives the wrong sense. Scylla knows quite well what to say:Footnote 8 she is quite clear about what Carme wants from her (258 quid tantum properas nostros nouisse furores?), she has in fact already begun confessing her passion for Minos (264) and she euphemistically refers to it in the second half of line 265 (malum hoc). In the next line Scylla uses forms of dicere two more times, clearly in response to her own rhetorical question (dicam equidem, ‘yes, I shall say it’, and non dicere … non sinis, ‘you force me to say it’): these two phrases likewise show that Scylla's difficulty lies not in deciding what to say but in actually saying what she already has in mind. The following passage (268–72) further demonstrates that what Scylla is hesitating to do is not to find something to say but specifically to name Minos (and note again 271 dicendum est, ‘it must be said’).Footnote 9 Finally, it would be rhetorically preferable if the two questions paralleled each other: the second question—quo … exordiar ore?—means ‘how shall I look you in the eye as I begin telling you about it?’ (= ‘I cannot look you in the eye’); the first question should mean ‘how shall I say it to you?’ (= ‘I cannot’).Footnote 10 Once the problem is recognized, the correction suggests itself: qui dicam?—‘how shall I say it?’.

It is true that the adverbial qui had colloquial currency (it is common in Plautus and Terence, for instance),Footnote 11 but this does not make it unfit for the present context: as Lyne shows, the speeches of Carme and Scylla feature a considerable amount of colloquial elements.Footnote 12 The corruption can be paralleled more than once in Catullus, for instance at 67.17 (qui [Puccius: quid V] possum?) and 37 (qui tu [ed. Ald. 1502: quid V] istaec, ianua, nosti?).Footnote 13

To sum up:

nil amat hic animus, nutrix, quod oportet amari,
in quo falsa tamen lateat pietatis imago,
sed media ex acie, mediis ex hostibus—eheu,
qui dicam quoue ausa malum hoc exordiar ore?
dicam equidem, quoniam tu nunc non dicere, nutrix,
non sinis: extremum hoc munus morientis habeto.
Nurse, my soul loves nothing that ought to be loved,
nothing in which some semblance of duty, however false, might lurk,
but from the midst of the fighting, from the midst of the enemy—alas,
how shall I say it, with what face shall I dare begin my account of this woe?
Yes, I shall say it, since you yourself, Nurse, do not permit me now not to say it:
take this last gift from me as I die.

Footnotes

This paper was produced during the term of a Government of Ireland Postdoctoral Fellowship funded by the Irish Research Council (project ID: GOIPD/2016/549).

References

1 Text from Lyne, R.O.A.M., Ciris: A Poem Attributed to Vergil (Cambridge, 1978), 80Google Scholar.

2 Baehrens, A.[E.], ‘Emendationes in Cirin’, Neue Jahrbücher für Philologie und Paedagogik 105 (1872), 833–49, at 845Google Scholar.

3 Sillig, I., P. Virgilii Maronis quae vulgo feruntur carmina Culex, Ciris, Copa et Moretum (Leipzig, 1831), 244Google Scholar.

4 Lyne (n. 1), 214.

5 Cf. Lyne (n. 1), 214: ‘How shall I begin?’.

6 OLD s.v. os 1 8b: ‘the face as showing or failing to show signs of shame; (pregn.) command of countenance, assurance, “face”’.

7 Kaster, R.A., Emotion, Restraint, and Community in Ancient Rome (Oxford, 2005), 162 n. 18CrossRefGoogle Scholar makes a slightly different emphasis: ‘A Roman who was thought to have behaved shamefully could be asked, in tones of incredulity, “with what face” he came into the sight of others […]; the answer could be that he had a “hard” or “iron face” (os durum or ferreum), one incapable of blushing.’ Yet this applies to situations when people are not ashamed, as, for instance, in the Cicero example.

8 Just as Phaedra does (Eur. Hipp. 345): πῶς ἂν σύ μοι λέξειας ἁμὲ χρὴ λέγειν; ‘if only you could say for me what I must say!’. On the use of Euripides’ Hippolytus in the Ciris, see De Gianni, D., ‘La nutrice di Scilla e la nutrice di Fedra: ispirazioni euripidee nella Ciris’, Vichiana 12 (2010), 36–45Google Scholar.

9 Again, we may compare Phaedra, who hints to the Nurse that she is in love, but is reluctant to name Hippolytus; unlike Scylla, however, she succeeds in making the Nurse utter his name for her (Hipp. 347–52).

10 It seems necessary to take dicam and exordiar as future forms rather than as (deliberative) subjunctives: the question quo … ore? does not mean ‘what face am I to assume to tell you about it?’ but ‘what face shall I have as I tell you about it?’, as the Livy and Terence parallels show.

11 On the colloquial character of qui, see e.g. Adams, J.N., An Anthology of Informal Latin, 200 bc–ad 900 (Cambridge, 2016), 194–5CrossRefGoogle Scholar. But note Chahoud, A., ‘Idiom(s) and literariness in classical literary criticism’, in Dickey, E., Chahoud, A. (edd.), Colloquial and Literary Latin (Cambridge, 2010), 42–64, at 44 n. 5CrossRefGoogle Scholar, observing that, despite its colloquial currency, qui can find place in higher linguistic registers too: ‘This phrase [qui fit] and similar questions introduced by adverbial qui (e.g. qui potest/potis est?) are found in early high-register poetry (e.g. Acc. trag. 418), in Lucretius (1.168) and in formal prose (e.g. Cic. Fat. 38; Sal. Cat. 51.24).’

12 See Lyne (n. 1), 193 on 226 aegroto, 199 on 241 quouis, 200 on 244 macerat, 202 on 247 digna atque indigna, 203 on 249 senio, 208 on 257 torques and nutricula, 211 on 261 odimus, 215 on 268 uides, 241 on 328 est … nostrum.

13 See in general Trappes-Lomax, J.M., Catullus: A Textual Reappraisal (Swansea, 2007), 9CrossRefGoogle Scholar (with a list of other possible examples); on the latter context, see esp. Adams, J.N., ‘Nominative personal pronouns and some patterns of speech in Republican and Augustan poetry’, PBA 93 (1999), 97–133, at 115–16Google Scholar. Another possible parallel is Verg. Ecl. 2.2 (nec quid speraret habebat), where Gratwick, A.S., ‘Corydon and his prospects’, CR 23 (1973), 10Google Scholar proposed qui—which is now printed by Ottaviano in her recent Teubner edition (Ottaviano, S., Conte, G.B., P. Vergilius Maro: Bucolica, Georgica [Berlin, 2013], 42Google Scholar). S.J. Heyworth, BMCR 2014.02.47 objects that ‘Vergil does not otherwise use the form’; id., Cynthia: A Companion to the Text of Propertius (Oxford, 2007), 171Google Scholar shows that at Prop. 2.14.58 qui has no manuscript support and should not be printed, observing that ‘none of the Augustan poets uses the adverb except Horace in his prosaic hexameters’ (after Housman, A.E., ‘Butler and Barber's Propertius’, CR 48 [1934], 136–9, at 139Google Scholar), though he admits that ‘Ovid also uses it, but only in poems to be dated to his exile: ep. 17.213, and perhaps tr. 3.4.21’. It can perhaps be noted that the Virgil of the Eclogues is not (yet) an Augustan poet.