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Quisque Suos Patimur Manes

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  31 August 2011

H. J. Rose
Affiliation:
St. Andrews University

Extract

Few passages of Virgil have led to the expending of more ink than the above (Aen. VI, 743), and, to my mind, it is seldom that a crux has less deserved the name. I wish to show that the sense is perfectly clear and ordinary Latin, observing a usual convention of verse, and further, that it was taken as such within about a century of Virgil's death, and that this continued to be the interpretation of the soundest exegetes, as it is now.

Type
Research Article
Copyright
Copyright © President and Fellows of Harvard College 1944

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References

1 Fowler, W. Warde, Religious Experience of the Roman People, London, 1911, p. 386Google Scholar.

2 Horace, C. III, 4, 21–22.

3 See, for an ingenious suggestion, which, right or wrong, has nothing to do with Virgil's use of Orcus, Wagenvoort, H. in S.M.S.R., xiv (1938), p. 33 sqqGoogle Scholar.

4 Georg. iv, 190.

5 Statius, Theb., VIII, 84.

6 Theb., XII, 816.

7 See Hopfner, Th., Griechisch-ägyptischer Offenbarungszauber (Wessley, Studien zur Palaeographie und Papyruskunde, XXI), Leipzig, 19211924, Vol. I, p. 27Google Scholar. He would trace this note to a combination of the idea of the daimon in Plato with “die volkstümliche Auffassung von zwei Daemonen, einem guten und einem bösen.” Be that as it may, it is wholly un-Virgilian in doctrine. For the real and normal relation, in all good Latin, of genius to manes, see the facts in the Thesaurus, VI, 1834, 38 sqq.

8 Virg., Aen. VI, 745–747. I do not discuss the vexed question of the order of lines 743–747.

9 Ausonius, II, 103 Peiper.