Near the end of the first book of his De reditu the poet Rutilius is delayed in Triturrita, on the Tuscan coast, because of the dark and stormy weather. The South-West Wind with its dripping wings—says the poet in an Ovidian imitationFootnote 1 —does not cease from summoning pitch-black clouds and obfuscating the sun's light for several days (631–2).Footnote 2 Elegant images of constellations (633–8)—perhaps not just ornamental, but also indicating the dates and the duration of the delayFootnote 3 —and the reference to the tempestuous sea and to two possible explanations of ocean's tides (639–44) round the first book off (1.631-9):
632 negare B: necare VR
Although the meaning of the first couplet (631–2) is clear, a textual difficulty seems to affect the pentameter. Since the editio princeps by Giovanni Battista Pio (B, dated to 1520), a well-established tradition of scholarsFootnote 4 has preferred the vulgate reading negare Footnote 5 to necare, a reading found in V (Vienna, Österreichische Nationalbibliothek, lat. 277, dated to 1502) and R (Rome, Bibl. Corsiniana, Caetani 158; c.1520/30).Footnote 6 However we reconstruct the stemma (bipartite: VB R, V BR; tripartite: V B R)Footnote 7 , necare was the reading of the archetype, whereas negare could be a banalization of necare Footnote 8 or a conjecture of the editor princeps.Footnote 9
The Belles Lettres editor, Wolff, represents the only exception within the most recent Rutilian textual criticism. He prints—rightly, in my opinion—the transmitted text necare,Footnote 10 though defending the meaning of the word as follows: ‘le verbe necare … a le sens de «tuer en noyant, noyer», ici métaphorique’.Footnote 11 It is of course true that Rutilius conveys the idea of the storms as a deluge,Footnote 12 and that necare is the ancestor of the Romance words for ‘drowning’,Footnote 13 since it is the first piece of evidence we have for this specialized use of neco (mergendo necare)Footnote 14 already in Late Republican and Early Imperial Latin.Footnote 15 Nevertheless, in this passage necare does not seem to mean ‘drown’ (‘kill by drowning’), but rather seems to possess a metaphorical sense that could be glossed, for the sake of classification,Footnote 16 as tollere.Footnote 17 This nuance is well attested for neco from Publilius onwards (Publil. Sent. P 14 pro medicina est dolor, dolorem qui necat).Footnote 18
Consequently, the poet probably means that the wind (with the clouds and the rain) has metaphorically ‘killed’, i.e. ‘suppressed, eliminated’, the light of the sun, obscuring it. This image is of course not unknown to Latin poetry, as a Virgilian parallel shows (Verg. Aen. 1.88-9): eripiunt subito nubes caelumque diemque | Teucrorum ex oculis; ponto nox incubat atra. To these passages I would like to add Apul. Met. 1.3.1 (solem inhiberi, … stellas euelli, diem tolli, noctem teneri) and some further texts in which necare, enecare and interimere refer, in the wider sense of tollere, particularly to the extinguishing of fire and light (mostly by stifling): Ov. Rem. am. 808 lenis alit flammas, grandior aura necat (807 uento restinguitur ignis); Macrob. Sat. 1.19.13 cum sol … obscurando sidera ueluti enecat ui luminis sui conspectum eorum auferendo; Fronto, Ep. p. 47,4-5 v.d.H. ne uentus lucernam interemat. A final example, drawn from the carmina of Alcimus Avitus of Viennes (5.200-7), appears to be quite close to our Rutilian passage: cum surgens mediam nubes se porrigit atra | nascentemque diem depulso lumine clausit . | in molem nox densa coit, perit obrutus aer | palpantesque manus densas sensere tenebras | atque repercussus uexatur anhelitus aeger: | et si sopitos flando quis suscitet ignes | aut flammas excire uelit, compressa necantur | lumina , etc.
In conclusion, it seems that the material gathered here allows us to restore the transmitted reading in the main text, to place negare in the apparatus, and to explain necare as ‘suppress’.
