Tears

Abstract

WHEN HE ENCOUNTERS IMAGES of the Trojan War in Carthage, Aeneas weeps uncontrollably, having already remarked that This Loeb translation, supplying the understood syntactic context, irons out the telescopic way in which Virgil has all but elided the two nouns, causing ‘lacrimae rerum’ to read like a genitive of definition – ‘the tears of which things are made’ – rather than of attribution – ‘the tears belonging to things'. Certainly the ‘largus flumen’ that runs down Aeneas’ face interposes a watery veil between perceiver and percept, dissolving its objective reality into subjective grief – a compound that Wordsworth would couch in more general epistemological terms as ‘the mighty world / Of eye, and ear – both what they half create, / And what perceive’.1