Pairs Of Passages in Virgil

Extract

Increase in knowledge of the psychology of ordinary people, and still more of poets, added to recent progress in scholarship, has affected our necessary approach to old critical problems more than we fully realize yet. In trying to understand ancient poets old questions, such as how to make sense of a passage, how to prove that a poet is consistent with himself, and what the intention of the poet was, are coming to seem more and more insufficient and sometimeseven the wrong questions to ask. Further, it is dangerous to make a solution to a problem depend on answers to such questions, especially when the problem concerns a great and most authentic poet such as Aeschylus or Virgil. Again and again the text of Virgil has been emended for in- sufficient reasons; for example, to make sense, or to agree with the assumed intentions of the poet. The truth is that Virgil, like other great poets, wrote down sometimes not the precise, prosaic result of inten- tions, or any proposition accurate and coherent at some particular moment, but words that symbolized some long mental history, with reference to different meanings actual at different times, or else something that was true all at the same time, but ambiguous and complex, with meanings outreaching syntax, grammar, and words.

When Virgil wrote rapidum cretae or Cretae ueniemus Oaxen he invented the name Oaxes. It was partly a town in Crete, and partly several different rivers in Asia. In so far as it was in Crete, Cretae must be understood, and rapidum translated ‘swift’.