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Lucretius 3. 492–3*
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 11 February 2009
Extract
His translation is, ‘obviously because the violence of the disease is dispersed throughout the body and as it forces out breath stirs up foam…’ The difficulty is that nowhere else does ‘distracta’ mean ‘dispersed’. Moreover, in vv. 501 and 507, in the same sequence of argument, the meaning is clearly ‘torn apart’, as usual. One way of meeting this difficulty is to read ‘anima’ in 493, as proposed by Tohte. However, this gives the barely defensible ‘anima spumas’ and is unsatisfactory in another respect. Lines 499–501, in which ‘ut docui’ must refer back to 492–3, imply that the ‘animus’ as well as the ‘anima’ was mentioned there and that the effect of epilepsy is to upset the relation between the two.
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- Copyright © The Classical Association 1973
References
page 293 note 1 In view of ‘spumas agit’ in 489, it is probably better to take ‘agens’ with ‘spumas’ than with ‘animam’. Kenney, in his note on 493, finds this an acceptable alternative.
page 293 note 2 This, of course, involves changing ‘vis’ in 492 to ‘vi’ and taking ‘turbat’ as an intransitive verb.
page 293 note 3 See the note on 500–1 in Bailey's edition. Lucretius does not make clear how the ‘umor’ (503) produces the seizure. However, Plato (Timaeus 85a) speaks of the mind's being directly affected by ‘phlegm’ (one of the ‘humours’).
page 293 note 4 See e.g. 3. 790 ( = animus) and 3. 638 (= anima).