At 02:15 PM 4/17/01 -0500, 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.
The standard work on the text of Virgil in the sixteenth century was J.
Pierius Valerianus, Castigationes et varietates Virgilianae lectionis
(1521; repeatedly reprinted in annotated editions of Virgil's text).
Valerianus points out that the "Ille ego" verses are controversial and
testifies that "insofar as the ancient manuscripts are concerned, I have
discovered none so far in which the Aeneid begins with these verses --
though in some codices they have been added separately by a later hand
(postscripti)." (As it happens, this manuscript layout was fairly common;
there's a reproduction of a twelfth-century exemplar in Christopher
Baswell, Virgil in Medieval England [1995], pp. 43.) Valerianus, however,
thinks that the "Ille ego" verses are probably Virgilian, and says that
most people (bona hominum pars) think as he does.
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David Wilson-Okamura http://virgil.org [log in to unmask]
Macalester College Virgil Tradition: discussion, bibliography, &c.
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