Moretum 15

Extract

So E. J. Kenney in the OCT Appendix Vergiliana (1966). The same scholar has now given us his secundae curae in The Ploughman's Lunch. Moretum. A Poem Ascribed to Virgil (Bristol Classical Press, 1984), which was on its way in luminis oras when the sibling edition of A. Perutelli, [P. Vergili Maronis] Moretum (Pisa, 1983), saw the light of day.

Only three words of line 15 are above any kind of suspicion: et reserat…ostia…, ‘and he unbars the door’ (ostia poetic pl.), some door, that is, which he, Simulus, prouidus heros (line 59), must open to reach a pile of grain not left exposed outside his cottage, but stored somewhere.

clauis (v.l. claui) is semantically unobjectionable in close association with reserat: cf. Petronius 94.7f. Eumolpus…limen egressus adduxit repente ostium cellae…exemitque raptim clauem…reseratis foribus intrat Eumolpus. But here it strangely overemphasises the internal security of the cottage, whose only other occupant was the slave-woman Scybale, and she, unlike the usual run of pilfering servants (see Nisbet-Hubbard on Horace, C. 2.14.26), was its unica custos (line 31). More important, claui(s) usurps the place which sense and style alike require for the substantive qualified by the participle clausae. (F. Leo, ALL 10 (1898), 438, suggested that it was a substantive. It is indeed easy, as Perutelli observes, to encounter in medieval Latin the noun clausa > Old French close > English closet, parallel to clausu > French clos.