Hostname: page-component-cd9895bd7-7cvxr Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-12-25T06:34:36.710Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false

Io! In Ovid

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  11 February 2009

Allan Kershaw
Affiliation:
Penn State University

Extract

The scribes of the Latin poets were not, as a rule, in the habit of interpolating exclamatory particles; on the contrary, their tendency was to trivialise. The particle io has MSS authority in two passages in Ovid where distinguished critics reject it.

Kenney in the Oxford Text of Ars Amatoria 3.742 prints.

labor, io: cara lumina conde manu.

Type
Shorter Notes
Copyright
Copyright © The Classical Association 1993

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

References

1 P. Ovidi Nasonis Heroides (repr. Hildesheim, 1967).

2 Cf. Martial, , ecquis, io, revocat discedentemque reducit? / ecquis, io, largas pandit amicus opes? (5.25.4–5)Google Scholar.

3 Again, at Met. 5.625 io Arethusa is neither a cry of grief, nor joy; Alpheus is searching for the hidden nymph.

4 io immediately precedes at Her. 5.118; A.A. 2.1; Met. 3.442; Met. 3.728; Met. 4.513; Met. 5.625 (bis); Fast. 4.447; words intervene at Am. 1.2.34; A.A. 2.1; Tr. 4.2.51; Tr. 4.2.52. At Am. 1.7.38 the particle appears with neither vocative nor imperative.

5 Luck in his Teubner edition (Stuttgart, 1988) places a colon between the particle and the imperative.

6 Procris' io may also remind us that, at the beginning of the episode, she had been likened to a Bacchant, ut thyrso concita Baccha (A.A. 3.710); cf. Silius 4.779 where Imilce, likened to a Bacchant, criesio coniunx…refer.

7 The particle is accepted by Dörrie, H., P. Ovidii Nasonis Epistulae Heroidum, (Berlin, 1971)Google Scholar. Housman, in his denunciation of lines 103 and 106 as interpolations (Classical Papers, p. 408), is at his most amusingly perverse.

8 I thank my colleagues Archibald Allen and Stephen Wheeler for helpful discussion.