Horatiana

Abstract

cum prorepserunt primis animalia terris,mutum et turpe pecus, glandem atque cubilia propterunguibus et pugnis, dein fustibus, atque ita porropugnabant armis, quae post fabricauerat usus,donec uerba, quibus uoces sensusque notarent,nominaque inuenere; dehinc absistere bello,oppida coeperunt munire et ponere leges,ne quis …uoces and sensus are not in pari materia; indeed, uoces notare is nonsense, as Gow says. The defect was first pointed out by Housman, J. Phil. xviii, pp. 5–8; his remedy was to transpose one word and read donec uerba, quibus sensus, uocesque, notarent, nominaque inuenere. I doubt if any scholar not already familiar with Housman's note could understand his Latin here without considerable analytical effort; and I cannot but think that Housman was for once demanding from a pair of commas a cabalistic virtue hardly resident in the seal of Solomon. Admittedly he supplies a long list — one page and a half—of illustrative dislocations; but in my opinion two objections remain. In the first place, ‘interlacing’ (as our Platonists now term a form of what Plato called hyperbaton) of the clauses A B in the form A B A B is quite frequent in Latin verse; but A B A B A is rare in the extreme, not to be found in Horace, not perhaps in any Latin author except Lucretius. Secondly, the insertion of uoces, ‘expressions’ generally (cf. Gow), in such a way as to disrupt the pair uerba nominaque ‘verbs and nouns’ would be awkward, and for Horace anomalous, in the most lucid of contexts; here it makes confusion worse confounded.