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‘THE DEATH OF INTESTATE OLD MEN’: GILBERT HIGHET'S PAPER ON JUVENAL 1.144

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  27 March 2019

Robert J. Ball
Robert J. Ball*
Affiliation:
Professor Emeritus, University of Hawaii
*
robertjball@gmail.com
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Extract

The verse hinc subitae mortes atque intestata senectus (Juv. 1.144) has long fuelled considerable debate and discussion among classical scholars. This hexameter occurs in the passage of the first satire that describes the aspect of the patron-client relationship where the rich patron, ignoring the plight of his poor and hungry clients, enjoys a sumptuous but deadly feast. After dining on delicacies such as boar and peacock, he bathes on a bloated stomach, causing him to die suddenly and apparently intestate, and causing those angry at being deprived of their legacy to cheer at his funeral (1.140b–6):

      quanta est gula quae sibi totos
      ponit apros, animal propter conuiuia natum!
      poena tamen praesens, cum tu deponis amictus
      turgidus et crudum pauonem in balnea portas.
      hinc subitae mortes atque intestata senectus.
      it noua nec tristis per cunctas fabula cenas;
      ducitur iratis plaudendum funus amicis.

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Type
Research Article
Information
The Classical Quarterly , Volume 69 , Issue 1 , May 2019 , pp. 363 - 369
Copyright
Copyright © The Classical Association 2019 

INTRODUCTION

The verse hinc subitae mortes atque intestata senectus (Juv. 1.144) has long fuelled considerable debate and discussion among classical scholars. This hexameter occurs in the passage of the first satire that describes the aspect of the patron-client relationship where the rich patron, ignoring the plight of his poor and hungry clients, enjoys a sumptuous but deadly feast. After dining on delicacies such as boar and peacock, he bathes on a bloated stomach, causing him to die suddenly and apparently intestate, and causing those angry at being deprived of their legacy to cheer at his funeral (1.140b–6):

quanta est gula quae sibi totos
ponit apros, animal propter conuiuia natum!
poena tamen praesens, cum tu deponis amictus
turgidus et crudum pauonem in balnea portas.
hinc subitae mortes atque intestata senectus.
it noua nec tristis per cunctas fabula cenas;
ducitur iratis plaudendum funus amicis.

Gilbert Highet (1906–1978) was one of Columbia University's greatest teachers and in his time the most celebrated classical scholar in America.Footnote 1 Although Highet published across a broad spectrum of classical literature, on Greco-Roman authors and their impact on the classical tradition, he devoted a significant part of his research to Juvenal, the subject of one of his books.Footnote 2 While recently examining Highet's files, I found a paper he had completed on Juv. 1.144—a paper he had planned to publish, analysing the scholarship related to that hexameter and concluding with his own emendation for it.Footnote 3

Highet's paper deals strictly with Juv. 1.144 and has nothing to do with his controversial use of the biographical approach to Juvenal's satires.Footnote 4 I have reproduced Highet's words exactly as they appear in his paper, while verifying all his references to the ancient and modern authors and providing (where appropriate) additional bibliographical information in his footnotes.Footnote 5 I have introduced (where appropriate) footnotes surrounded by brackets to sharpen some of his statements or to cite scholarly views on the subject that have appeared since his death, identifying all such interventions with my initials ‘RJB’.

THE TEXT OF HIGHET'S PAPERFootnote 6

In his first satire, Juvenal denounces the selfish and greedy rich who order banquets which they refuse to share with friends or clients. However, he says, they soon pay the penalty when they take a hot bath to encourage digestion.Footnote 7 The result of this is sudden death (1.144): hinc subitae mortes atque intestata senectus. Sudden death, and what? Intestata senectus means, as we shall see from Juvenal's only other use of the adjective (3.274),Footnote 8 ‘old age which has not made a will’.Footnote 9 But this turns the passage into nonsense.Footnote 10 The result of combining overeating with a hot bath may well be sudden death, but gluttony and hot baths can scarcely result in making old men careless about drawing up their wills. Apoplexy, certainly. Improvidence, surely not.

* * *

Attempts to explain or alter the passage have been made in four different ways:

  1. (1) The entire five-word phrase is a hendiadys and is equivalent to subitae mortes senum intestatorum, ‘the sudden death of old men who have not made their wills’.Footnote 11 Their gluttony causes the old men to drop dead so quickly that they cannot even dictate or sign a will. The meaning here is perfectly sound, but the construction of the sentence is impossible. Normally a hendiadys breaks up a single idea into two aspects which complement each other and which, if taken separately, would make partial sense. Thus, in Vergil, G. 2.192,Footnote 12 pateris libamus et auro means pateris libamus aureis, but Vergil makes the compliment more elaborate by detailing it: part of the ceremony is that the wine is poured out of libation bowls, and the other part is that it is poured from gold.Footnote 13 But in this passage, mors and senectus do not complement each other. The death described is abrupt and unexpected. Old age implies survival to the full term of human life. Furthermore, an idea which would normally be expressed by a noun related to another noun by possession cannot be put into the hendiadys pattern. As Housman said: ‘mors et Caesar will never be Latin for mors Caesaris.’Footnote 14

  2. (2) Intestata does not mean ‘without a will’ but ‘without a witness‘, sine testibus, so rare as to be unreported, phenomenal.Footnote 15 The results of gluttony are ‘sudden death and the non-occurrence of old age’. Greedy millionaires die young, or middle-aged at best. This makes sense. In this same book, Juvenal says that the bad emperors killed off so many noblemen that prodigio par est in nobilitate senectus (4.97), and he could well have used the same idea in another context. But it is impossible to believe that his audience, hearing intestata in connection with death, would give it any meaning other than its normal one (as in 3.274); and there is no evidence elsewhere in Latin for the word as meaning ‘underwitnessed’.Footnote 16

  3. (3) The word intestata means ‘without a will’ but implies another situation. By a sort of metonymy, it signifies ‘prematurely old’.Footnote 17 There are two alternative punishments for solitary gormandizing: one is that the glutton dies suddenly from a stroke; the other is that he becomes old before his time, before the normal period when he should be thinking of making his will. Surely this is too far-fetched for normal hearers to interpret. Or else intestata means ‘having nothing to leave by will’ after spending everything on luxurious feasts: ‘omnia luxu consumpserant, hinc senes effecti nihil testari poterant’.Footnote 18 This is a barely conceivable meaning of the word, and it is barely acceptable as sense (see Juv. 11.38–45). But both these proposals meet an insuperable obstacle. This is that the run of Juvenal's thought is not concerned with ill health or premature old age or poverty incurred through debauchery—but with death, quick and unexpected death. That is the sense of 1.144–6, lines which describe the report of the rich man's death as new, unforeseen, sudden, and then mention his funeral. We must read the three nouns and adjectives together: subitae mortes, intestata senectus, noua fabula. There is no room here for an invalid or a pauper: we need nothing but a stricken corpse.

  4. (4) Perhaps then the word intestata is corrupt. This was suggested by Madvig, who remarked: ‘subitas mortes effici cenandi luxuria nihil mirum est, sed quid ea ad testamenta impedienda pertineat, non intelligo.’Footnote 19 Therefore, he emended it to infestata, which is paleographically elegant and would give a good variation on the sense of subitae mortes, ‘old age in constant danger of death’. Similar attempts were made later by Weidner, who in his edition ventured intempesta;Footnote 20 Corelli, who put forward intentata as ‘unattained’;Footnote 21 Slater, proposing intercepta;Footnote 22 and Allen, offering interlecta. Footnote 23 Madvig's suggestion was countered by Mayor with an objection which, if valid, would strike down the others also.Footnote 24 He declared that intestata must be genuine because its meaning is taken up in the following lines. By dying without a will, the greedy man cheats all his friends out of their expectations of legacies: therefore, they are angry at him and feel no sorrow for the suddenness with which he was snatched away. When they heard of his death, they said: ‘Old Scratch has got his own at last, hey?’ and laughed, like the acquaintances of Scrooge in A Christmas Carol. Footnote 25 He used to cheat their hopes of a dinner; now he has cheated their hopes of a bequest.Footnote 26

* * *

But where does the pivot of the problem rest? Not on the word intestata but on the word senectus. The result of selfish and unhealthy gormandizing is not that one grows old, in whatever testamentary situation, but that one dies, and dies suddenly. Sudden death is the termination of a similar course of gluttony in Pers. 3.98–106, on which this passage is closely modelled.Footnote 27 Intestata will have the accepted, the only possible sense, if it is used together with a word connoting death. Therefore, the corrupt word seems to be senectus. Polstorff saw this in 1896 and conjectured intestata sepulcra, which is scarcely acceptable Latin.Footnote 28

I propose senum nex. Nex most commonly means ‘death caused by external violence’; but it can also mean a more or less ‘natural’ death. In Ovid, a magical sleep resembles nex (Met. 7.328–9); Eurydice's disappearance into the underworld is her second nex (Met. 10.64); it is the word for the death Ariadne expects (Her. 10.144), the melodious passing of the swan (Tr. 5.1.12), and the death Ovid's enemy is to pray for (Ib. 124). Seneca uses the word for death so gentle as to be imperceptible: fata … nobis sensum nostrae necis auferunt (Cons. Marc. 6.21.7); and Suetonius has it of Lepidus, who died of love and grief (Iul. 5, cf. Plin. HN 7.122Footnote 29).Footnote 30

The pattern of the sentence is one of Juvenal's favourites: a phrase is set down and then restated with a striking twist. So rarus sermo illis et magna libido tacendi (2.14); sedem figere Cumis … atque unum ciuem donare Sibyllae (3.2–3); caecus adulator dirusque a ponte satelles (4.116); cellam uacuam atque suam (6.122); magnus ciuis obit et formidatus Othoni (6.559); flexisse … propositum et uitae contrarius ire priori (9.20–1); ut pueris placeas et declamatio fias (10.167); and many more.Footnote 31

The causes of the corruption may well be a copyist's misreading of senū nex Footnote 32 and his visual memory of the end of line 142, amictus. Footnote 33

CONCLUSION

At the very least, Highet's paper provides a stimulating review of the scholarship on Juv. 1.144—a verse classicists have picked apart for ages. By shifting the focus from intestata to senectus (a clever approach to solving the problem), Highet furnishes a creative and appealing emendation for this hexameter by having it read hinc subitae mortes atque intestata senum nex. He justifies it by attaching to nex a meaning used especially by OvidFootnote 34 and by pointing to Juvenal's strategy of expanding on an idea with a striking twist, which also reveals Juvenal's occasional use of an end-of-verse rhythmic jolt.

The reading senum nex draws on the reading senectus, reinforcing the idea that Juvenal is referring to the sudden death of a greedy old guzzler.Footnote 35 By emending senectus to senum nex, Highet eliminates the incongruity or contradiction in the hexameter—that excessive gormandizing can cause such an individual to die suddenly and become careless about preparing his will. By using intestata with a word connoting ‘death’, the emended hexameter moves dramatically from death caused by immoderate gormandizing to the ‘death’ of a gormandizer who simply may have forgotten to prepare his will.

Highet's emendation sustains the image of the selfish patron, elderly and apparently intestate, who dies suddenly as a result of his own bad habits. Highet's analysis of the scholarship related to Juv. 1.144, supplemented by the recent scholarship I have incorporated in his footnotes, should afford classicists the opportunity to reconsider a puzzling and problematic question. Whether or not scholars accept Highet's emendation, it deserves a prominent place on the traditional roster of scholarly suggestions to help solve a mystery that continues to attract the attention and curiosity of Juvenal enthusiasts.

Footnotes

I wish to thank: Ian Highet, Gilbert Highet's grandson, representing the Gilbert Highet Estate, for authorizing me to publish Highet's paper on Juv. 1.144; CQ’s editor Bruce Gibson for his warm reception of this article when I first approached him and for his cogent suggestions once it was accepted for publication; and CQ’s anonymous reader for his/her incisive suggestions, including this comment: ‘[Highet provides] an attractive textual suggestion. Unsurprisingly the emendation is fully in Juvenal's style—one would expect nothing else from Highet.’

References

1 For information about the life and career of Gilbert Highet, see Ball, R.J., ‘Gilbert Highet and the classical tradition’, in his The Classical Papers of Gilbert Highet (New York, 1983), 1–14Google Scholar, and his ‘Gilbert Highet and Classics at Columbia’, in Columbia Magazine (Fall 2001), 14–20Google Scholar, reprinted in de Bary, W.T., Kisslinger, J. and Mathewson, T. (edd.), Living Legacies at Columbia (New York, 2006), 12–25 and 654Google Scholar.

2 See Highet, G., Juvenal the Satirist (Oxford, 1954)Google Scholar for an examination of the life, work and influence of Juvenal, which includes a separate chapter devoted to each of his sixteen satires. See also Ball (n. 1 [1983]), 349–78 for a bibliography of Highet's publications, which includes twenty-one books and roughly a thousand articles, ten or twelve related to Juvenal.

3 In this undated paper, Highet refers to a book published in 1972 (n. 14 below), and when he became seriously ill in 1977, he could no longer pursue scholarly research—leading one to conclude that he must have completed this paper sometime between 1973 and 1976.

4 For two key articles on the controversy that erupted in mid twentieth century scholarship on the biographical approach vs the persona-theory, see Anderson, W.S., ‘Anger in Juvenal and Seneca’, California Publications in Classical Philology 19 (1964), 127–95Google Scholar, reprinted in id., Essays on Roman Satire (Princeton, 1982), 293–361CrossRefGoogle Scholar and Highet, G., ‘Masks and faces in satire’, Hermes 102 (1974), 321–37Google Scholar, reprinted in Ball, R.J., The Classical Papers of Gilbert Highet (New York, 1983), 268–86Google Scholar.

5 At two points in his paper, I have inserted three spaced asterisks (as he sometimes did in his publications) to indicate a pause and a transition to another section—not to indicate that he had intended to provide additional material or that additional material had accidentally dropped out.

6 Gilbert Highet Papers, Box 30 (Columbia University, Rare Book and Manuscript Library).

7 [See above for the text of this passage in Latin, containing the problematic 1.144. RJB]

8 The theme in that passage is not dissimilar: a man may easily die suddenly after dinner.

9 [For scholars who favour this meaning, see Cloud, J.D., ‘Satirists and the law’, in Braund, S.H. (ed.), Satire and Society in Ancient Rome (Exeter, 1989), 49–67, esp. 58Google Scholar (‘The old man dies suddenly without having had time to make his will’); Braund, S.M., Juvenal: Satires, Book 1 (Cambridge, 1996), 106Google Scholar (‘death comes so quickly he does not have time to make a will’); Nappa, C., Making Men Ridiculous: Juvenal and the Anxieties of the Individual (Ann Arbor, 2018), 47–9, esp. 48 n. 31Google Scholar, who follows Cloud ‘if the line is not interpolated and intestata is genuine’. RJB]

10 [For two scholars who arrive at exactly the same conclusion as Highet—even though they could not have known what Highet was thinking and Highet could not have known what they were thinking—see Courtney, E., A Commentary on the Satires of Juvenal (London, 1980), 114Google Scholar: ‘If intestata has its normal sense “intestate” (3.274) it makes nonsense of the line (italics mine)’, and see Green, P., Juvenal: The Sixteen Satires (London, 1998 3), 127Google Scholar: ‘As Courtney rightly insists (114), intestata (“intestate”) at line 144 is illogical as an epithet for senectus (“old age”).’ RJB]

11 See Friedländer, C.D., D. Iunii Iuvenalis Saturarum Libri V (Leipzig, 1895), 158Google Scholar; see also de Labriolle, P. and Villeneuve, F., Juvénal: Satires (Paris, 1921), 11Google Scholar.

12 [I have spelled the poet's name as Vergil (not Virgil)—the spelling Highet insisted on using to avoid what he regarded as a medieval misspelling (for Highet's detailed defense of this spelling, see his The Classical Tradition [Oxford, 1949], 74 and 584 n. 13Google Scholar). RJB]

13 See Szantyr, A., Lateinische Syntax und Stilistik (Munich, 1965), 782–3Google Scholar for the section titled ‘Hendiadyoin’, where Szantyr points to Juv. 1.72 with a fine note by Friedländer [(n. 11), 145–6, who applies ‘Hendiadyoin’ to Juvenal's per famam et populum. RJB]

14 See Housman, A.E., ‘Elucidations of Latin poets: I. Juvenal 1.132–146’, CR 13 (1899), 432–4, esp. 433Google Scholar, reprinted in Diggle, J. and Goodyear, F.R.D. (edd.), The Classical Papers of A.E. Housman, 3 vols. (Cambridge, 1972), 2.489–91, esp. 491Google Scholar. Cimbros stragemque in Juv. 8.251 is not in contradiction to this: it expresses two distinct aspects of the carrion feast—the gigantic bodies and the huge number of corpses.

15 See Housman (n. 14 [1899]), 434, reprinted in Housman (n. 14 [1972]), 491, and his D. Iunii Iuvenalis Saturae (Cambridge, 1905 1 and 19312), 6 in 1905 and 1931Google Scholar editions, in which he compares Juvenal's use of intestata senectus with Martial's use of rara senectus (6.29.7) and summarizes his view with the comment ‘intestata, adeo inuisitata ut teste careat’. [See Ferguson, J., Juvenal: The Satires (New York, 1979), 12 and 122Google Scholar, who accepts Housman's interpretation since it ‘gives point to senectus and parallels Mart. 6.29.7’; but see Courtney (n. 10), 114, who believes that Juvenal would not have used intestata in Housman's sense, adding that ‘the adverb intestato is employed much less harshly by Pompon. fr. 113’. RJB]

16 [But see OLD 2 s.v. intestatus, which lists three occurrences of this word in Plautus, where it has the meaning ‘without witnesses’: Curc. 622 (Phaedromus’ use of intestatus), Curc. 695 (Cappadox's use of intestatum) and Mil. 1416 (Pyrgopolinices’ use of intestatus). Yet, this rare meaning occurs in comedy—in Curc. 622 and Mil. 1416, it even has the double sense of ‘without witnesses’/‘without testicles’—supporting Highet's belief that Juvenal's audience, hearing intestata in connection with death, would give it its normal meaning. RJB]

17 See Nicholson, R.A., ‘On Juvenal, 1.132–146’, CR 14 (1900), 53Google Scholar.

18 This is suggested by A. Mancinelli in his commentary (Venice, 1492). It is quoted by Hofius, K., Bemerkungen zu Juvenal (Wesel, 1891), 3–5, esp. 4Google Scholar.

19 See Madvig, J.N., Adversaria critica ad scriptores Graecos et Latinos, 3 vols. (Copenhagen, 1871–84), 3.249–50Google Scholar.

20 [The only reference to a scholar's work in Highet's paper without a footnote. For Weidner's emendation, see his D. Iunii Iuvenalis Saturae (Leipzig—not 18731, 48 but 18892, 17), where he says fort. intempesta in his apparatus criticus without additional explanation. RJB]

21 See Corelli, E.C., ‘On Juvenal, Sat. 1.144’, CR 19 (1905), 305Google Scholar [who actually translates intentata as ‘untried’ or ‘unreached’. See also Courtney (n. 10), 114, who regards intentata (the scribal spelling for intemptata) as ‘the least implausible solution, though it is rather weak’; Rudd, N., Juvenal: The Satires (Oxford, 1991), 7 and 146Google Scholar, who accepts intentata, translating it as ‘cancelled’ or ‘unsampled’; and Green (n. 10), 7 and 127, who, picking up on Courtney's comment, suggests interrupta (‘interrupted’). RJB]

22 See Slater, D.A., ‘Conjectures’, CR 27 (1913), 158–60, esp. 160Google Scholar [where he suggests intercepta while making this statement: ‘That is why old age is denied to men’. RJB]

23 See Allen, S., ‘On Juvenal, Sat. 1.144’, CR 27 (1913), 216Google Scholar. No doubt thinking of frondes inter … legendas in Verg. G. 2.366, Allen translated his interlecta senectus as ‘old age nipped in the bud’, an oxymoron which might have amused Juvenal himself.

24 See Mayor, J.E.B., ‘Notes on Plin. Ep. 1.5.3 and on Juvenal 1.144–6’, Journal of Philology 13 (1885), 230–2, esp. 231–2Google Scholar.

25 [See Dickens, C., A Christmas Carol (London, 1843), stave 4Google Scholar, where the Ghost of Christmas Future gives Scrooge a glimpse of his own funeral and the behaviour of those attending it. RJB]

26 [Although Highet analyses four ways in which scholars have tried to resolve the problem plaguing this passage, a fifth category of proposals exists, where scholars regard one or more lines in it as an interpolation, not written by Juvenal and needing to be deleted from the text.

Knoche, U., D. Iunius Iuvenalis Saturae (Munich, 1950), 6Google Scholar deletes lines 144 and 145 in their entirety (from hinc to cenas [see above for the Latin text of these verses])—verses Knoche encloses in brackets to identify them as interpolations.

R.G.M. Nisbet tries to resolve the difficulty by proposing two solutions set out in three articles: (1) Nisbet's deletion of line 144 in his review of K. Müller's Petronii Arbitri Satyricon and Clausen's, W.V. A. Persi Flacci et D. Iuni Iuvenalis Saturae, in JRS 52 (1962), 227–38, esp. 234Google Scholar, reprinted in Harrison, S.J. (ed.), R.G.M. Nisbet: Collected Papers on Latin Literature (Oxford, 1995), 6–28, esp. 20–1Google Scholar; (2) Nisbet's deletion of most of line 144 and the first word of line 145 (from subitae to it) in his article ‘Notes on the text and interpretation of Juvenal’, in N. Horsfall (ed.), Vir Bonus Discendi Peritus: Studies in the Celebration of Otto Skutsch's Eightieth Birthday = BICS (Supplement 51, 1988), 86–110, esp. 87–8, reprinted in Harrison (this note), 227–60, esp. 229–30; (3) Nisbet's reiteration of his proposal of 1988 in his article ‘How textual conjectures are made’, MD 26 (1991), 65–91, esp. 81–2Google Scholar, reprinted in Harrison (this note), 338–61, esp. 352–3, where he continues to maintain that most of line 144 and the first word of line 145 constitute an interpolation.

Willis, J. (ed.), D. Iunii Iuvenalis Saturae sedecim (Leipzig, 1997), 8Google Scholar includes Nisbet's proposal of 1988 in his idiosyncratic Teubner edition, where he tries to justify in his preface the deletion of over three hundred verses, all italicized as interpolations.

Although Highet can no longer speak for himself, I can report and agree with his advice to his graduate students, that, even with a problematic text like Juvenal's, instead of deleting a verse as an interpolation, one should try to emend it with as little alteration as possible. RJB]

27 Persius was elaborating on a suggestion he found in Hor. Epist. 1.6.61: crudi tumidique lauemur.

28 See Polstorff, H., In Iuvenalis satiras observationes criticae (Güstrow, 1896), 4–5Google Scholar. [Although Polstorff's emendation seems syntactically acceptable, Highet may have regarded it as too bold or too awkward to provide a satisfactory solution to the problem posed by line 144. RJB]

29 [Suetonius refers to the death of Lepidus using only the phrase post necem consulis; Pliny provides the cause, saying that, after his divorce, Lepidus died Appuleiae uxoris caritate. RJB]

30 [Although Highet uses nex in a sense not normally found in the nominative case (as shown by the passages he cites from Ovid to Suetonius), he does draw on a valid meaning of this word by citing appropriate passages that demonstrate the use of that meaning in other cases. RJB]

31 [Highet's emendation senum nex not only provides 1.144 with the kind of striking twist that Juvenal sometimes uses at the end of his verses but with the kind of rhythmic jolt that Juvenal occasionally employs in that location, which contributes to the power of his poetry.

In this regard, Juvenal occasionally concludes his verses with one-syllable nouns like nex, such as lex (7.102), rex (5.14, 5.137 and 14.255), lux (12.1 and 14.105) and uox (9.78 and 11.111), and with other one-syllable words fuelling the rhythmic jolt, such as bos (10.268), dic (6.279 and 10.338), uas (7.119) and mus (6.339, where Juvenal's unde fugit mus may have been inspired by Horace's ridiculus mus in Ars P. 139).

Furthermore, Juvenal's fugit mus exemplifies the poet's occasional practice of concluding his verses with a two-syllable word followed by a one-syllable word—the formula adopted by Highet for his emendation of 1.144: for Juvenal's end-of-verse two-syllable word/one-syllable word rhythmic jolt, see 2.115, 3.305, 4.140, 5.72, 5.166, 6.339, 6.395, 6.440, 6.457, 6.649, 7.194, 8.36, 8.98, 8.191, 8.215, 8.232, 10.240, 10.310, 10.349, 14.38, 14.105, 14.226, 14.316 and 15.98. RJB]

32 [For scribal abbreviations, such as a macron over a ‘u’ to designate a missing final ‘m’ (senū in the final sentence of Highet's paper), see Bischoff, B., Latin Paleography: Antiquity and the Middle Ages, translated by Croinin, D.O. and Ganz, D. (Cambridge, 1990), 150–68, esp. 151, 157 and 163CrossRefGoogle Scholar; and Cappelli, A., Dizionario di abbreviature latine ed italiane, revised by Geymonat, M. and Troncarelli, F. (Milan, 2011 7), xi–lix, esp. xvii, xxiv, xxviii, xxxix and xliiiGoogle Scholar. RJB]

33 [In an undated draft of his paper—the only previous extant draft, which looks almost like the final version now published in CQ—Highet concluded with a paragraph he decided not to use in the final version, a paragraph that effectively rounds out and reinforces his argument and that I have decided to reproduce in this note as follows: ‘The cause of the corruption might well be a copyist's misreading of the phrase in an early manuscript which had no divisions between words. An important number of the corruptions in Juvenal are due to misreadings of such a manuscript. The scribe who saw INTESTATASENVMNEX would be assisted by AMICTVS in line 142 in misreading and miscopying INTESTATASENECTVS’. RJB]

34 See Highet (n. 2), 173 for a list of Juvenal's favourite Roman poets, including Ovid.

35 Although excessive guzzling may cause a person's death even in the prime of life, it causes the death of an elderly man in the above context, whether one accepts senectus or senum nex. Although the plural senum may seem to point to the death of more than one person, it need not be interpreted in the above context any more literally than the plural mortes in the very same line.