I see what you mean and normally I would agree with this line of thinking, but in this case it seems to be a clear-cut, binary thing: either Vergil intended this (his ‘signature’ hidden in an acrostic in the first lines of the Aeneid) or he didn’t. The fact that we’ll probably never know for sure doesn’t change this.
I do see where you are coming from. But it is precisely because I have great difficulty with “Virgil intended this” that I prefer to avoid the issue altogether. Can something be read in a particular way seems always a more fruitful line. Even when we discover markers which point to something under the surface I think we can get by without appealing to authorial intentions. Its a bit of an obsession of mine I am afraid born of arguments with people who seem to have a direct line to the departed.
I saw this in the Guardian the other day quoting a letter following the death of Jacques Derrida
“(His death) confirms the analysis he made. This text event was unintended by its author and its meaning can only be deciphered by its readers.”
This may have been mentioned earlier, but Pharr has it as the dative of separation: “many verbs of warding off, robbing, and ridding, depriving, and separation take a dative, especially in poetry.”
The forum seems to have swallowed my reply. Someone may have mentioned this earlier, but Pharr calls this the dative of separation: “Many verbs of warding off, robbing, and ridding, depriving, and separation take a dative, especially in poetry, as eripies mihi hunc errorem, you will rid me of this mistake; silici scintillam escudit, he strikes a spark from the flint.”
Thanks for the contribution sheepdot. If you look back to the previous page of this thread you’ll see that Pharr’s opinion had been reported by seneca2008, but you actually quote it, which is helpful.
eripies mihi hunc errorem doesn’t seem to me really on a par with Vergil’s phrase. “mihi” has an interest in the action in a way that silici does not. (I think that’s true in general of Pharr’s “many verbs of warding off” etc.) I think the real question is whether Vergil could/would have used the form silici here as ablative, and/or (in deference to seneca’s anti-intentionalism) how contemporary “competent readers” would have understood it.
Oh, and welcome to Textkit!
Michael
Thank you for the welcome!
I looked back through, and I don’t see that anyone has mentioned Maclardy, who says “dat. sing… dat. instead of the abl. of separation, which (esp. of persons) may follow compounds ab, ex, de, and in some cases ad. Silici is governed then by excudit, = struck FROM a flint. Some wrongly call silici an abl. of the instrument. For this dat., consult A. & G. 229, and c; B. 188, 2, d; G. 345, REM. I; H. 385, 4, 2).”
As he says, “esp. of persons.” That reinforces what I said. I agree not abl. of instrument. The scintilla is struck out of the flint, abl. governed by ex-.
Acrostics. There’s an incontestable one in Aratus’ poem on weather-signs, in a passage adapted by Vergil in his Georgics:
λεπτὴ μὲν καθαρή τε περὶ τρίτον ἦμαρ ἐοῦσα
εὔδιός κ᾽ εἴη: λεπτὴ δὲ καὶ εὖ μάλ᾽ ἐρευθὴς
πνευματίη: παχίων δέ καὶ ἀμβλείῃσι κεραίαις
τέτρατον ἐκ τριτάτοιο φόως ἀμενηνὸν ἔχουσα
ἤ νότῳ ἄμβλυνται ἢ ὕδατος ἐγγὺς ἐόντος.
The initial letters of the first five verses of the last book of the Iliad happen to be λ ε υ κ η. This Homeric acrostic will be accidental (I’m not aware that anyone has yet argued otherwise: no doubt they will), but it’s unquestionably there, and hence available for emulation by a cleversticks hellenistic poet who advertises both his recognition and his imitation-with-variation of it by having the textual λεπτή mark his λεπτη acrostic at the outset.
This is a far cry from what we are now asked to believe. The article on alleged “boustrophedon acrostics” is the latest offering in the effusion of ever crazier craziness that has emerged since Aratus’ λεπτή acrostic (which has programmatic significance) was first spotted some decades ago.
That Virgil acrostic seems to me to be somewhat characteristic and symptomatic of the modern research on some of the most studied auctores. Not everything, of course, by any means. It does beg the question: if Virgil truly had wanted to attach an acrostic, why on earth would he have hidden it so profoundly and in so cryptic a message that it takes 2000+ years to be found?
I’m in some sympathy with the thrust of the question, but in modern times (for Callimachus was quick to see it) Aratus’ λεπτη acrostic seems to have evaded detection until 1960. We’re conditioned by what we expect to find, and can be blind to what’s in plain sight. But recent “discoveries” become more and more implausible.