[241] The old reading was ‘ad moenia.’ which is found in one of Ribbeck's cursives (see on 2. 139). Heyne, who, like his predecessors, retained it, adopted in his later editions a change in the pointing, suggested by a “vir doctus,” so as to construct “quaesitum Aenean ad moenia Pallantea” with ‘adfore,’ ‘quaesitum’ being understood as a participle. His reasons for this were the harshness of ‘quaesitum’ after ‘uti,’ and the impropriety of Nisus talking about slaughter and spoils, when his object was to summon Aeneas. Wagn. restored ‘et’ and brought back the usual pointing, defending the construction of the supine after other than verbs of motion by a fragment of Sall. “neque vos ultum iniurias hortor,” and arguing from v. 208 that Nisus had more than a simple errand to Aeneas in his mind from the first. No doubt Virg.'s judgment may be questioned in allowing Nisus and Euryalus to waste their time in killing and plunder; but as he chose to make them do so, there is nothing strange in making them avow their intention unrebuked. He was thinking of course of the double object of Ulysses and Diomed Il. 10. 206, 207. The supine may be explained either by saying that ‘fortuna uti’ is really equivalent to a verb of motion (e. g. “fortuna usis ire”), or by the wider considerations suggested by Wagn., or by both. Serv. says that some placed the line after v. 243. ‘Moenia Pallantea’ v. 196.
This text is part of:
John Conington. P. Vergili Maronis opera. P. Vergili Maronis Opera. The works of. Virgil. , with a Commentary by John Conington, M.A. and Henry Nettleship, M.A. London. Whittaker and Co., Ave Maria Lane;. George Bell and Sons, York Street, Covent Garden. 1876.
The National Endowment for the Humanities provided support for entering this text.
This work is licensed under a
Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 United States License.
An XML version of this text is available for download, with the additional restriction that you offer Perseus any modifications you make. Perseus provides credit for all accepted changes, storing new additions in a versioning system.