Two Passages in the Third Book of the Aeneid

Extract

Conington, after duly reporting that this is a solitary instance in Virgil of a hemistich where the sense is incomplete, concludes a lengthy comment as follows: ‘On the whole, there seems no good reason to doubt that we have the passage as Virgil left it. If we cannot complete the hemistich satisfactorily, we may console ourselves with thinking that he could not either.’ But why should we be so ready to limit the poetic invention of Virgil? Have we learnt nothing from ‘sic uos non uobis’? Consider the situation. Andromache has met Aeneas unexpectedly, and asks about his son Ascanius. ‘Is he still alive?’ The question brings back to her mind the terrible fate of her own son, Astyanax, and her emotion chokes her. Virgil could not complete the line, because its speaker could not.