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Abstract
Eight conjectures are offered upon the text of Lucretius’ De rerum natura (1.912, 3.464, 586, 933, 962, 4.897, 5.888–889 and 6.365).
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Notes
1 For discussion of this wordplay, see especially J.M. Snyder, Puns and Poetry in Lucretius’ De Rerum Natura (Amsterdam, 1980), 31 and 132.
2 The same letters, albeit in the singular, occur again at 2.386–387: ignis | noster hic e lignis.
3 One year prior to Lachmann’s edition, Hugo Purmann had adopted ignes et lignum in his text: see Neue Beiträge zur Kritik des Lucretius (Naumberg, 1849), 17. The correction was first made by Q2, the Italian fifteenth-century correcting hand in the Quadratus.
4 For similar transpositions of adjacent words, cf. 2.184 illud quoque] quoque illud OQS; 2.640 armati matrem O : matrem armati Q; 3.249 sanguis tum] tum sanguis OQ; 3.332 fiunt consorti] consorti fiunt OQS; 3.564 ipse oculus] oculus ipse OQS; 3.999 sufferre laborem] laborem sufferre OQ; 3.1073 temporis aeterni] aeterni temporis Q : aeternitatem corporis Oa.c.; 4.342 porro pariter O : pariter porro Q; 6.710 aliquid genere] genere aliquid OQ; 6.1078 auro res] res (ses S) auro OQS. Confusions over a greater space can be seen at 1.117 (QS), 2.203 and 6.281.
5 Merrill’s attempt to read manante animaque was doomed to failure by the forlorn hope that –que per could correspond with perque in 587.
6 mors is indeed echoed both in the vocative mortalis and mortem of the following line.
7 Merrill (1907) translated the question as more open: “what troubles you so much?”.
8 The use of the adverb for a predicative adjective is common in colloquial Latin, particularly with bene, male, ita and sic. Lucretius, in this field and others, is more experimental, using both palam (2.568) and clam (5.1157) with esse. See further the survey of C.F.W. Müller, “Zur lateinischen Grammatik”, Philologus 9 (1854), 593–630, at 617–626.
9 tanto opere: 3.674, 688, 768, 1076, 5.30, 380; magno opere: 1.637, 711, 2.176, 3.105.
10 tanto opere: 2.169.
11 tanto opere: 3.186, 910, 4.109, 5.1056; magno opere: 6.1230.
12 quod now could only introduce a causal clause, i.e. nonsense.
13 The resultant metre, which removes a natural pause in the third foot, is unobjectionable in Lucretius. In fact, immortalis is thrice positioned such that there is no word division in the third foot (3.624, 715, 778).
14 We may compare 4.119–120, where quid appears four times in one-and-a-half verses.
15 I presume it is a happy typographical error that quid is read for quod in B.P. Wallach’s Lucretius and the Diatribe Against the Fear of Death (Leiden, 1976) on p. 66: at pp. 62 and 64 her text instead reads the typical quod.
16 For a similar corruption cf. Sen. HF 1281 agedum ET : agendum βP; Apul. Met. 9.38 trumpha dum (Lipsius) : triumphandum Fϕ.
17 On the basis of Verg. Aen. 11.111 equidem et uiuis [sc. pacem] concedere uellem, notwithstanding the transitive use of concedere, one would have thought that uiuis would have been conjectured here. Yet it is probably too much for Nature to speak to the old man as if one already mortuus.
18 Krokiewicz’s iam annis is generally favoured, but agedum is not elsewhere modified by iam in Latin, and the elision of iam in Lucretius is relatively rare, attested only at 4.1180 iam amissum and 6.8 iam ad caelum.
19 Cf. also ps.-Sall. Ep. ad Caes. 2.13.7 ubi anima naturae cessit; Val. Max. 5.1.1 (of Alexander’s death) non hominum ulli, sed naturae fortunaeque cedens.
20 A tangential matter to this discussion is whether uelis later in 897 should be retained or rather emended, after Pierre Gassendi, to remis: the argument against the transmitted text is that, whereas uela and uentus are both linked with propulsion by the air, the naval comparison should reflect the internal cause (the anima moving the membra) as well as the external cause (aer) for the body’s movement, which remis, as “oars”, would provide. I am inclined to retain uelis uentoque and restrict the comparison that Lucretius envisages to 892ff.: the uela are the body parts that receive the aer, which parallels the uentus. It is useful to compare 6.1031, where bodily propulsion is compared to a ship and its sails being driven on by the wind: trudit et impellit quasi nauem uelaque uentus.
21 It is impossible to accept nauis as a monosyllable, which its proponent Konrad Müller recognises to be an “audacia” and “subrusticum et nimis cascum”.
22 “Lucretius 4.497”, CQ 52 (2002), 398–399. Similar objections had already been raised by Lambinus.
23 I have discussed parallel cases of this kind of corruption, such as at 1.305–306, 1022–1023, 2.421–422, 3.594–596, 4.990–999, 5.468–470, 6.15–16, 509–510, and 1009–1012, in “Some problems in the text and transmission of Lucretius”, Latin Literature and its Transmission (ed. R. Hunter and Sp. Oakley) (Cambridge, 2016), 22–53, at 31–39.
24 ueluti occurs 10 times in Lucretius, all but once (6.504) so placed after the first syllable of the first foot.
25 Munro had already suggested datival puero illi, although I have no notion what he intended by the additional comment that “perhaps Lucr. wrote puero li”.
26 For elision at the close of the second foot and after the third-foot caesura, cf. e.g. 1.180, 762, 4.1064, 1124, 5.1199 (typically with atque).
27 I do not place any particular weight on the objection of Büchner that the dative nubi is not otherwise found in the poem.
28 o and u are regularly confused in the poem’s transmission. o for u: 1.384, 759, 803, 1084, 3.106, 476, 732, 834, 5.482; u for o: 2.504, 879, 887, 911, 3.132, 5.61, 516, 784, 1055, 6.73, 170, 1122.