[567-588] ‘At that moment I spied Helen lurking in the temple of Vesta. I was doubting whether to kill her—it seemed monstrous that she should enjoy a safe and triumphant return, after all the misery she had brought on us and ours.’ Like the four lines prefixed to the Aeneid, this passage is traditionally said to have been written by Virg., but omitted by Tucca and Varius. The external evidence against its genuineness is strong, stronger than against the genuineness of the former passage, the MSS. which contain the lines now in question being very few, and apparently none of them of great importance. The early interpreters do not comment on them, though their existence is recognized by a doubtful notice in Serv., which is the chief authority for the Tucca and Varius story. But when we come to internal considerations, the case is altered. The lines, though possibly disfigured by a few harshnesses, are vigorous and elaborate, and in general worthy of Virg. They are perhaps not required by the context, as v. 601 might be explained without them, and the appearance of Venus could be accounted for by supposing with Donatus that Aeneas was meditating suicide; but the context is improved by their presence, and v. 589, as Wagn. has pointed out, coheres rather awkwardly with v. 566. The aesthetical or ethical objection that has been taken to them, as if Virg. would not have made his hero think of killing a woman in a temple, seems to belong to a later age (see on v. 583), nor need the discrepancy between the present account of Helen and what we read 6. 510 foll. about her introducing the Greeks to the chamber of Deiphobus disturb us much, at the same time that one or both reasons may have led to their exclusion on critical grounds, whether by Tucca and Varius, or by some less authorized regulator of Virg.'s text. The external evidence however seems to me too formidably strong to be summarily ignored, so that I have followed the earlier editors, who enclose the passage in brackets, rather than the bulk of the later, who print it as an unquestioned part of the text. Where possibilities are so many and facts so few, an attitude of doubt seems the only one which can be safely assumed, except by those, who, like Jahn and Peerlkamp, condemn the lines unreservedly, on internal as well as external grounds.
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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.
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