OK. But what would Spenser have been likely to believe about them?
>On 16 Apr 2001, at 14:42, tom bishop wrote:
>
>> At what point were the "proëmic" lines fronting the Aeneid detached
>> from the poem, and what name, if any, did they go by afterwards? My
>> history of Virgil scholarship is pretty sketchy. I know Ovid and
>> Martial took "arma virumque" etc. to be the opening of the poem. But
>> Servius knew the introductory lines too, and they're not entirely
>> unVirgilian.
>
>See _Virgilio Eneide_, ed. Ettore Paratore, vol. 1 app. crit to l. 1 and
>its commentary pp. 123-27 for a full discussion of all the issues.
>Aelius Donatus (vita Vergilii) and Servius (praef. IV) testify that the
>four lines beginning "Ille ego..." prefaced the opening "Arma
>virumque... ." Varius removed or cancelled them. (1) The complete
>silence of the major manuscript tradition about the proem, (2) the
>fact that the principle writers following Vergil always cite the proem
>separately from "Arma virumque" and (3) the inappropriately
>intimate or familiar tone of the lines have convinced most scholars
>that they are apocryphal. The absence of the proem in the
>manuscript tradition suggests it never prefaced the Aeneid or was
>was removed very early in the transmission.
>
>
>======================================
>Steven J. Willett
>Shizuoka University of Art and Culture
>Dept. of International Culture, Faculty of Cultural Policy
>1794-1 Noguchi
>Hamamatsu City, Japan 430-8533
>Tel/Autofax: (53) 457-6142
>Japan email: [log in to unmask]
>US email: [log in to unmask]
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