SERPENTINE CONSTRUCTIONS: LUCRETIUS, DE RERVM NATVRA 3.657–63

Abstract

The mutilation of the snake provides compelling evidence that the soul and the body form an interconnected structural complex. The verbal complex, however, in which this serpens is articulated, has long been a problematic one. At the heart of the problem is the meaning of serpentis utrumque, a phrase which has been treated with considerable indulgence and is printed in the majority of twentieth-century editions, though it does not yield a satisfactory sense. It is usually interpreted to mean ‘both parts of a snake’, as if utrumque serpentis were equivalent in meaning to utramque partem serpentis. The word ‘parts,’ however, is an evasion of the semantic value of utrumque because it eliminates the ambiguity, in this context, of the pronoun ‘each of two,’ the reference of which should be made clear by the context, and supplies instead the very thing that is in question here, a clearly defined object, ‘both parts,’ for discidere. This may seem a small point but ‘both parts’ greatly obscures the nature of the problem. If we take a more literal approach to utrumque, we will get a better sense of the frustrated linguistic expectation caused by the pronoun: ‘of a snake with a darting tongue, quivering tail, long body, to cut up each of the two’. The question immediately arises: to what does ‘each of the two’ refer? According to the normal usage of uterque the answer should be apparent. In 3.658 it is not. It has long been assumed that utrumque refers to cauda and corpore but such a reference is not at all clear from the syntax. In the description of the snake we do not find, and this is the essential point, two clearly defined components of the snake to which utrumque (‘each of the two’) can refer in accordance with its meaning and the syntax of the sentence. Instead, we find three components, expressed in three parallel ablative phrases, uibrante lingua, micanti cauda and procero corpore, all of equal importance in delineating the snake. And since the whole construction is dependent on one verb, discidere, the normal expectation would be that, whatever words are the antecedent of utrumque, those words would be in the accusative as well; the shift from cauda and corpore in the ablative to utrumque in the accusative, in what is essentially an appositional relationship, is syntactically jarring.