[208] Legit pontum, ‘skims the deep,’ is not precisely parallel to 3. 127, 706, Ov. F. 4, 289, 566, where the notion is really that of picking the way among islands or sunk rocks, so that perhaps it had better be compared to ‘legere oram’ or ‘litus,’ the motion of the serpents along the surface of the water resembling that of a ship skirting the land. ‘Sinuat,’ the common reading, supported by Pal., Med., and other MSS., and by Serv. is restored by Wagn. instead of ‘sinuant,’ the reading of Heins. and Heyne, which Pierius found in some very old copies. As Wagn. remarks, the nom. ‘pars cetera’ is emphatic, opposing the second part of the sentence to the first. ‘Their heads and breasts are erect; the rest floats in sinuous waves along the sea.’
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.