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MACROBIUS, SATURNALIA 5.11.1–3 AND A VIRGILIAN READING

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  24 April 2013

Salvatore Monda
Salvatore Monda*
Affiliation:
Università del Molise, Isernia (Italy)
*
salvatore.monda@unimol.it
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Extract

Macrobius devotes almost the whole morning of the third day in his Saturnalia to Virgil. Eustathius, in response to a question from Euangelus, examines what Virgil drew from the Greeks and from Homer in particular. In chapter 11 of Book 5, the expositor quotes and comments on some loci similes, judging in favour of the Roman poet. At the start of the chapter, he compares the bee simile in Aeneid 1.430–6 with a passage from Homer, Iliad 2.87–93:

Et haec quidem iudicio legentium relinquenda sunt, ut ipsi aestiment quid debeant de utriusque collatione sentire. Si tamen me consulas, non negabo nonnumquam Vergilium in transferendo densius excoluisse, ut in hoc loco:

      Qualis apes aestate noua per florea rura
      exercet sub sole labor, cum gentis adultos
      educunt fetos, aut cum liquentia mella
      stipant et dulces distendunt nectare cellas,
      aut onera accipiunt uenientum aut agmine facto
      ignauum, fucos, pecus a praesepibus arcent.
      feruet opus, redolentque thymo fraglantia mella.

Information

Type
Shorter Notes
Information
The Classical Quarterly , Volume 63 , Issue 1 , May 2013 , pp. 445 - 447
Copyright
Copyright © The Classical Association 2013

Macrobius devotes almost the whole morning of the third day in his Saturnalia to Virgil. Eustathius, in response to a question from Euangelus, examines what Virgil drew from the Greeks and from Homer in particular. In chapter 11 of Book 5, the expositor quotes and comments on some loci similes, judging in favour of the Roman poet. At the start of the chapter, he compares the bee simile in Aeneid 1.430–6 with a passage from Homer, Iliad 2.87–93:

Et haec quidem iudicio legentium relinquenda sunt, ut ipsi aestiment quid debeant de utriusque collatione sentire. Si tamen me consulas, non negabo nonnumquam Vergilium in transferendo densius excoluisse, ut in hoc loco:

Qualis apes aestate noua per florea rura
exercet sub sole labor, cum gentis adultos
educunt fetos, aut cum liquentia mella
stipant et dulces distendunt nectare cellas,
aut onera accipiunt uenientum aut agmine facto
ignauum, fucos, pecus a praesepibus arcent.
feruet opus, redolentque thymo fraglantia mella.
Ἠΰτε ἔθνεα εἶσι μελισσάων ἁδινάων,Footnote 1
πέτρης ἐκ γλαϕυρῆς αἰεὶ νέον ἐρχομενάων·
βοτρυδὸν δὲ πέτονται ἐπ᾽ ἄνθεσιν εἰαρινοῖσιν,
αἱ μέν τ' ἔνθα ἅλις πεποτήαται, αἱ δέ τε ἔνθα·
ὣς τῶν ἔθνεα πολλὰ νεῶν ἄπο καὶ κλισιάων
ἠϊόνος προπάροιθε βαθείης ἐστιχόωντο
ἰλαδὸν εἰς ἀγορήν· μετὰ δέ σϕισιν Ὄσσα δεδήει.

In Virgil's Aeneid, the simile characterizes the activity of the Tyrians; Homer compares the mass of Greek soldiers to bees. The comparison to bees is common in epic poetry,Footnote 2 but here Virgil's specific debt to Homer is evident.Footnote 3 None the less, while Virgil has followed Homer's lead in creating his simile, he is also remodelling, with a few alterations, his own description of busy bees at Georgics 4.162–9:Footnote 4

aliae spem gentis adultos
educunt fetus; aliae purissima mella
stipant et liquido distendunt nectare cellas;
sunt quibus ad portas cecidit custodia sorti,
inque uicem speculantur aquas et nubila caeli,
aut onera accipiunt uenientum, aut agmine facto
ignauum fucos pecus a praesepibus arcent:
feruet opus, redolentque thymo fraglantia mella.

At Aeneid 1.433 the reading attested by the direct witnesses to Virgil's text and retained by all editors is et dulci … nectare, as opposed to et liquido … nectare at Georgics 4.164. The text transmitted by Macrobius, in contrast, presents the enallage dulces distendunt nectare cellas.Footnote 5 Among the manuscripts of Virgil, only Vat. Pal. Lat. 1631 (P) offers dulcis, emended to dulci by another scribe.Footnote 6

Macrobius' attestation of the accusative dulces/dulcis is not cited either in critical editions of Virgil or in modern commentaries.Footnote 7 Yet enallage is a syntactical figure that the poet uses widely in the Aeneid, though he avoids it in the Eclogues and Georgics.Footnote 8 It is quite possible that Virgil, in transforming the description into a simile, has revised Georgics 4.164 not only by substituting the adjective dulcis for liquidus, but also by exchanging the syntactic relations among the words in the sentence. The generous use of enallage is a means by which the poet obtains defamiliarizing effects; by making his epic language more elaborate, it elevates the stylistic level, which is higher in the Aeneid than in the Georgics.Footnote 9 Macrobius' reading, also attested by codex P of Virgil, deserves serious consideration and, even if not accepted into the text, it incontestably merits a place in the critical apparatus.

References

1 I. Willis in his edition of Macrobius (Leipzig, 1970²) erroneously prints ἀδινάων, not ἁ-, a point made to me per litteras by Ms. Orla Mulholland (Berlin).

2 See e.g. Hes. Theog. 594–602 and Ap. Rhod. 1.879–85. Cf. Hornsby, R.A., Patterns of Action in the Aeneid: An Interpretation of Vergil's Epic Similes (Iowa City, 1970), 48–9Google Scholar; Polleichtner, W., ‘The bee simile: how Vergil emulated Apollonius in his use of Homeric poetry’, Göttinger Forum für Altertumswissenschaft 8 (2005), 115–60Google Scholar; K.C. Schell, ‘Vergil's self-referential simile: thematic construction through internal allusion in the Aeneid’ (Ph.D. Diss., Brown University, Providence, RI, 2009), 79–86.

3 See G.N. Knauer, Die Aeneis und Homer. Hypomnemata 7 (Göttingen, 1979²), ad indicem.

4 Sparrow, J., Half-Lines and Repetitions in Virgil (Oxford, 1931), 92Google Scholar observes that, in the longest repetitions, what in the Georgics occurs as description becomes a simile in the Aeneid (see also p. 90). See also Briggs, W.W. Jr., ‘Lines repeated from the Georgics in the Aeneid’, CJ 77 (1981), 130–47, at 140Google Scholar; id., Narrative and Simile from the Georgics in the Aeneid. Mnemosyne Suppl. 58 (Leiden, 1980), 71–3, Leach, E.W., ‘Sedes apibus: from the Georgics to the Aeneid’, Vergilius 23 (1977), 2–16Google Scholar. In all three bee similes of the Aeneid (1.430–6; 6.707–9; 12.587–92), Virgil reuses material from the Georgics (see also Aen. 7.64–7).

5 I verified this reading in MSS N (Naples, Biblioteca Nazionale, V B 10) and F (Florence, Biblioteca Medicea Laurenziana, Plut. 90 sup. 25). Early editors of Macrobius printed dulci, following the Virgilian tradition, though L. von Jan (Quedlinburg and Leipzig, 1852) recorded dulces in his apparatus as the reading of MSS AS (he was here using three MSS, PAS). F. Eyssenhardt (Leipzig, 18681, 18932) was the first to print dulces in the text, followed by Willis (n. 1). The new Loeb Saturnalia edited by R.A. Kaster (Cambridge, MA and London, 2011), 1.320, has dulces in the text and ‘dulci Verg.’ in the note, but more details can be found in Kaster's OCT edition (Oxford, 2011), 286: ‘dulces (dulcis cod P1 Verg.)] dulci Verg.’.

6 Px in G.B. Conte's recent edition: P. Vergilius Maro. Aeneis (Berlin and New York, 2009)Google Scholar. P varies in its spelling of the accusative plural of this and other third-declension adjectives: G. 3.178 dulcis FP dulces MR; 3.495 dulcis P dulces MR; 4.61 dulcis P dulces M; Aen. 3.140 dulces P (and other manuscripts); 4.33 dulcis MPR dulces F; 10.782 dulces P (and other manuscripts); for other adjectives see Ribbeck, O., Prolegomena critica ad P. Vergili Maronis opera maiora (Leipzig, 1866), 405–10Google Scholar.

7 Ribbeck, O. in his first edition of the Aeneid (Leipzig, 1860)Google Scholar followed von Jan (n. 5) for the text of Macrobius. He made no change in his second edition (Leipzig, 1895), though Eyssenhardt (n. 5) in the meantime had twice edited the Saturnalia and had printed the reading dulces. Virgil's editors seem to have worked from Ribbeck, which is doubtless the reason why recent editions still ignore Macrobius' dulces. On Macrobius' variants in the text of Virgil see Ribbeck's Prolegomena (n. 6), 210; Marinone, N., I Saturnali di Macrobio Teodosio (Turin, 1967), 896–901Google Scholar (in the Indice he uses * for ‘luoghi omerici e virgiliani notevoli per varianti del testo rispetto alla tradizione comunemente accettata’); Gamberale, L., s.v. ‘Eneide 10. La documentazione extra codici’, in Enciclopedia Virgiliana, vol. 2 (Rome, 1985), 299Google Scholar. There is no mention of Macrobius' dulces at Aen. 1.433 in any of these works, or in Marinone, N. s.v. ‘Macrobio’, in Enciclopedia Virgiliana, vol. 3 (Rome, 1987), 299–304Google Scholar.

8 On enallage as a strong coefficient of the sublime style in the Aeneid, see Conte, G.B., Virgilio. L'epica del sentimento (Turin, 2002), 3–63Google Scholar (esp. p. 16), Eng. tr. The Poetry of Pathos: Studies in Virgilian Epic (Oxford, 2007), 58–122 (esp. p. 71).

9 See Conte (n. 8), 16–18 (71–3 of the English translation).