marked upon them since they were first written—a long and honorable line reaching from Quintilian to Professor DeWitt. For the purpose of this paper, however, nothing more is necessary than to arrange the explanations which have been proposed into three groups and to give examples typical of each group. They are differentiated sharply from each other by the fact that, according to the first group, 550-1 are to be taken as a question, according to the second, as an exclamation equivalent to a wish unfulfilled, according to the third, which, I may say at once, I accept as far as the form is concerned, as a declarative statement. The earliest notice which we have of the lines is Quint. IX, 2, 64, who quotes them as an illustration of Emphasis: Est emphasis etiam inter figuras, cum ex aliquo dicto latens aliquid eruitur, ut apud Vergilium, Non licuit thalami expertem sine crimine vitam Quamquam enim de matrimonio queritur Dido, tamen huc erumpit eius affectus, ut sine thalamis vitam non hominum putet sed ferarum. Unfortunately, however, there is as large a disagreement among scholars as to the meaning of Quintilian's words as there is in regard to Vergil's, and I leave them for the moment without comment. Servius, also, has a note upon the lines but the nature of it is such that we cannot be quite sure how he interpreted them. On non licuit, he remarks: quia aliud volebat et aliud factum est, sicut solent dicere quibus aliter succedunt. Since, however, he applies the phrase more ferae to the lynx which, according to his citation from Pliny, mated with no male after the death of its first mate, he seems to have read the lines as a simple declaration. According to Servius, then, the thought would be, "You, Anna, helped me to my sin; it was not permitted me after the death of Sichaeus (so he interprets thalami expertem), to live a life free from sin (he compares crimine with culpa, line 19) like the lynx who lives 1... makes good sense, no one can det. is certal IV hot closely connected with th...* at ! following times, nor does it make elt??? prevented. Dido from living mateless like understood Anna as the agent who was Pre Lnutation expressed by non ticuit, there is Dato's statement which is implicit in th and in 552: non servata fides cineri test she herself was chitty responsible for to the editors of Verzil we find that the earlies *l the times as a question: so Hensius 8. 1 revilius c1666. Ruaeus Paris, 1675, Sedan 1746- and among those of later date, 8 Cooner New York 184. It is to • all the editors of Quintinan print the which I have onoted above, with a THE TITI, which is thus given to Dido's LE Rumus in his naraphrase: nonne Paliompar pntiorum in modum fera 0 Coat in translates then, "was 1 vivit sine conubio et crimine: hoc est, fera neque ferae iterum nubit neque impudica est. Implicit in such a statement is the conclusion which he expresses in his paraphrase: cur mihi non licuit vivere more ferae sine matrimonio et cum quolibet concumbere? By way of parenthesis it should be added that Peerlkamp did not ascribe this "abomination," as Henry called it, to Vergil since he thought that the text was corrupt and that the poet wrote, not more ferae, but vae miserae. Forbiger (Leipzig, 1845) prints the lines with an exclamation mark but says nothing in his notes about non licuit; on more ferae he remarks: cui nec amandi nec nubendi necessitas est. Sic Quintilianus (whose words he quotes) hunc locum intellexit. Dübner (Paris, 1858) has the exclamation mark, but when he quotes Quintilian in his notes, he uses the mark of interrogation after ferae on which he says: quae in lustro se condens abstinet ab iucunda societate vitae. Sic intellexit Quintilianus. This is, of course, a clear echo of Heyne. The most detailed discussion of the lines is given by Henry in his Aeneida, 11, 791 f. He finds himself unable to agree with Quintilian except in his idea that "the vita from which Dido complains her sister debarred her was the vita of wild animals generally, not of any one wild animal in particular.” Nor does he agree with Heyne and Wagner that this vita was an ascetic life apart from human society; "the vita ferarum . . . is, according to logical fitness and propriety, the innocent, chaste, and simple life of the ferae naturae." The only sentiment which he can find in the lines is "that the life of the fera is a life of innocence (sine crimine sine adulterio), and that Dido's sister, in precipitating Dido's connection with Aeneas, rendered such a life of innocence impossible to her." It is not clear from this what tone Henry gave to these lines, but in his earlier book, Notes on the Aeneid, he remarks: "It is as if she had said, 'how much happier if I had continued expers thalami,' etc!" Evidently, however, he understood Anna as the agent who was responsible for the limitation expressed by non licuit. = Conington describes the lines as a passionate exclamation. "We should probably say, 'Why was it not allowed me?' Dido grieves that she could not live an unwedded life—and wishes that she had been born to a wild life in the woods"; in regard to the character of this wild life, he agrees with Henry. Conington's interpretation is followed closely by Papillon-Haigh who, however, speak of a "passionate complaint." This is the prevailing view, too, among the editors of our American text-books; so, for example, GreenoughKittredge, Fairclough-Brown, Harper-Miller, Roberts-Rolfe, who add that the exclamation is equivalent to a wish unfulfilled in the past, "O, that I had been," a view which is implicit, of course, in the interpretation of all who consider the lines exclamatory in nature. The third explanation, according to which the sentence is a declarative statement, has not found much favor. Benoit so interpreted it and Plessis and Lejay agree with him. Ribbeck (Leipzig, 1895) and Hirtzel (Oxford, 1900) print their texts with a semicolon, as does Kappes (Leipzig, 1877) who remarks on non licuit, "es lag so in Schicksal," and on more ferae, "das Thier des Waldes kennt keinen Treubruch." Even among the scholars who agree in their punctuation of the lines there is a disagreement as to their meaning. Benoit, for example, thus paraphrases them: "je n'ai pu, dans une profonde solitude, vivre sans connaître les joies de l'amour et aussi sans crime," an interpretation which agrees, in the main, with that of Henry. To Plessis and Lejay, on the other hand, the most likely meaning seems to be (parait être) “les bêtes ignorent les lois du marriage et sont sans reproche, sans crime; le sort m'a refusé de vivre commes elles et de satisfaire de telles passions sans en courir aucun blâme." This last clause gives to Dido's words a meaning which Schaper, also, finds in them; he remarks, "also heisst thalami expers ohne regelbrechte Vermählung, in freier Liebe, ohne dass man sich Vorwürfe und Sorgen zu machen hätte," a meaning which, as Professor DeWitt (A. J. P. XLV (1924), 176) aptly remarks, is both "unpoetical and disgusting." According to Kennedy, in his summary of lines 450-705, the words mean, "I was not left to the single life which the free, wild beast lives," and the translation of Page, in his note, is similar: "it was not allowed me to live my life blamelessly, far from bridal chambers, untamed, untutored in such cares." The last word which I have seen on the matter is that of Professor DeWitt, in the article cited above, who finds the key in an "ideal of proud virginity" to which the phrase more ferae refers, and he compares, as Henry had done, the use of the Italian words fiero, fierezze. It is to be assumed, therefore, that he would accept Henry's interpretation of the passage. Since not all these explanations of Vergil's words can be correct, it is possible that none of them may be, but before I advance another it is well to consider whether those that have been made can be justified by normal grammatical usage and are in keeping with the thought of the entire passage. The construing of the sentence non licuit . . . curas as a question may be supported, as far as its mere form is concerned, not only by Vergil's own practice, but by that of poets and prose writers of all periods. There is this, however, to be noted about such questions introduced by non. Since they lack an interrogative particle, their character as questions must be clearly marked by other means, and this is done regularly, by Vergil invariably, I believe, either by the context, which is of such a character as to make it impossible to construe the sentence otherwise than as a question,—it stands, for example, in a series of questions or in dialogue,1 in which case, moreover, the questions which precede the non question are often put in the mouth of the same speaker and are introduced by some interrogatory word,2—or else the sentence with non is preceded, often actually introduced, by an interrogative pronoun,3 by a noun or pronoun in the vocative case, or by an imperative 1 Cf. Cic. Tusc. 1, 21, 48; Off. III, 19, 77; Verg. Aen. II, 596; IV, 39, 600. 2 Cf. Plaut. Merc. 750; Amph. 403; Verg. Ecl. 3. 17; Aen. IV, 307. |