[85] Od. 5. 295, Σὺν δ᾽ Εὖρός τε Νότος τ᾽ ἔπεσε, Ζεφυρός τε δυσαής, Καὶ Βορέης αἰθρηγενέτης, μέγα κῦμα κυλίνδων. Comp. also Enn. A. 17, fr. 5. Seneca (Nat. Quaest. 16) reproves Virg. for having made three out of the four winds blow at once. Trapp and Heyne try to defend him on the plea that shifting winds are common. But this obviously is not his meaning. All the winds leave the cave at once. Milton's classicism has led him to the same violation of nature, Par. Reg. Book 4: “nor slept the winds Within their stony caves, but rushed abroad From the four hinges of the world, and fell On the vexed wilderness” (quoted by Henry). The effect of the emission of all the winds from the skin in Hom. (Od. 10. 54), is that Ulysses is blown back to the island from which he came. ‘Ruunt’ seems here to be ‘upheave’ (see note on G. 1. 105); but it is possible that the ‘aequor’ may be conceived of as a kind of ceiling, which crashes down on a movement from below.
This text is part of:
John Conington. P. Vergili Maronis opera. P. Vergili Maronis Opera. The works of Virgil, with a Commentary by John Conington, M.A. Late Corpus Professor of Latin in the University of Oxford. London. Whittaker and Co., Ave Maria Lane. 1876.
The National Endowment for the Humanities provided support for entering this text.
This work is licensed under a
Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 United States License.
An XML version of this text is available for download, with the additional restriction that you offer Perseus any modifications you make. Perseus provides credit for all accepted changes, storing new additions in a versioning system.