[751] “‘Deponunt,’ quasi de navibus” Serv., rightly. “Caesar deponit legiones, equitesque a navibus egressos iubet de languore reficere,” Hirt. Bell. Alex. 1. 34. They had of course been already landed: but the word expresses with some vividness the fact of their subtraction from the ships' crews. It is perhaps hardly worth while to combine with this Heyne's explanation, “ut inutile onus.” Serv. mentions another interpretation, according to which a stop is placed at ‘volentem,’ and ‘deponunt’ taken with ‘animos’— “quae lectio et sententia Nascimbaeno castior visa est,” says Taubmann. ‘Animos’ forms an apposition like ‘corda’ above v. 729. ‘Egentis’ expresses not the absence of the thing, but the sense of its absence—a change of meaning equally observable in our word ‘want,’ as Henry remarks. Thus the expression is exactly contrasted with “laudum cupido” v. 138 above, 6. 823. With the construction Henry comp. G. 2. 28, “Nil radicis egent aliae.” One or two MSS. have ‘agentis,’ which has met with some approbation in later times.
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.