Hellow everyone, good night. I just would to know what’s the fonction of “fervere” in this bolded excerpt. Pharr wrote :“as though of the third conjugation,although fervet, a second conjugational form, has just occurred.” But i don’t understand yet.
quis tibi tum, Dido, cernenti talia sensus,
quosve dabas gemitus, cum litora fervere late
prospiceres arce ex summa, totumque videres 410
misceri ante oculos tantis clamoribus aequor!
“What were your feelings Dido at such sights, what sighs
did you give, watching the shore from the heights
of the citadel, everywhere alive, and seeing the whole
sea, before your eyes, confused with such cries” ( Translated by A. S. Kline)
https://logeion.uchicago.edu/ferveo
According to L&S there is both fervō and ferveō.
As for the meaning, I think it’s simply the verb of the infinitive with litora: when you were observing that the beaches were widely swarming.
Yes, both forms are attested. I suspect Vergil used the third conjugation form metri causa, since the second conjugation form would have been fervēre lātē.
if you scan it will be the third conjugation:
quosve dabas gemitus, cum litora fervere late
By the way, is there an ellipse in the first line of erat? i.e.,quis tibi tum, Dido, cernenti talia sensus [erat]?
I have to take issue with Barry’s simplistic notion that Vergil used the 3rd-conjugation form “metri causa.” For one thing, that implies that the 2nd decl. was the default form of the verb, which is simply not the case. For another, Vergil never did anything metri causa. To suggest otherwise is to take a very low view of his compositional procedures.
What’s interesting, and very curious, is that just two lines earlier we had opere omnis semita fervet. How to account for such conspicuous use of both conjugational forms within such a short space? Well, Lucilius, a hexameter poet himself, had even more ostentatiously played on the coexistence of the two forms: 357 fervit nunc, fervet ad annum.
Vergil’s poem is a self-standing work, but it teems (better to say it seethes, fervit) with resonances of earlier poetry.