Greetings all,
I am having a little difficulty with Lucan’s Pharsalia 2.94-96. Simply put, I cannot think of where the word exeruere may come from and what it might mean. Perseus does not seem to know either. The context is as such:
ut primum fortuna redit, servilia solvit
agmina, conflato saevas ergastula ferro
exeruere manus.
As soon as his fortune returned, he [Marius]
freed the battalions of slaves and those
gangs, with smelted iron, ---- savage hands.
It may well be an incredibly obvious oversight, but I am nevertheless perplexed Any help would be much appreciated. Many thanks.
Are you familiar with Whitaker’s Words? Here’s the entry you probably need:
exeru.ere V 3 1 PERF ACTIVE IND 3 P
exero, exerere, exerui, exertus V [XXXCX]
stretch forth; thrust out (of land); put out (plant); lay bare, uncover (body);
I wasn’t aware of Whitaker’s Words, but that does indeed fit the context. exero -ere does not have an entry in either Cassell’s or the OLD which is what seems to have confused me- I wonder why this is?
I too was baffled by this glaring omission, so I tried looking up similar words and similar spellings in Whitaker’s words, hoping to find a variant that might be listed. Exsero did the trick. Then I remembered that sometimes, when ex is added as a prefix to a word beginning in “s,” the “s” is dropped because of phonetic redundance. “Exero” and “exsero” don’t really sound much different, and furthermore, in poetry, the extra “s” doesn’t affect the meter.
Here’s Cassell’s entry:
exsero -serere -serui, -sertum, to stretch out, thrust out. Lit., linguam, liv.; caput ponto, Ov.: bracchia, Ov.; esp. in perf. partic. exsertus -a -um bared, protruding: dextris umeris exsertis, Caes.; unum exserta latus pugnae, Verg. TRANSF., to put forth, assert: ius, Plin. L.
Any help would be much appreciated. Many thanks.