[738] Misero seems to refer to Aeneas, as it is commonly taken, not, as Henry thinks, to agree with ‘fato.’ There would be no point in saying that Creusa died a violent death, even if we could conclude that to have been the case, or if it could be established that “miserum fatum” was the regular expression for such an end. Heyne is right in following the obvious order of the words, “ereptane fato mihi misero substitit, erravitne,” &c. ‘Erepta fato’ (which Henry illustrates from Livy 3. 50, “quod ad se attineat, uxorem sibi fato ereptam”) applies really to all three cases, ‘substitit,’ ‘erravit,’ and ‘resedit,’ the meaning being that she was separated finally from Aeneas, whatever was the cause: grammatically it belongs only to ‘substitit.’ Perhaps there may be something rhetorical in the confusion. At any rate Peerlkamp's ‘fato est erepta,’ which Ladewig adopts, would only render the passage more prosaic, and Ribbeck's ‘fato mi’ is sufficiently un-Virgilian. The indicatives are used instead of subjunctives, which we should naturally have expected after ‘incertum,’ on the principle illustrated on E. 4. 52, ‘substitit’ &c. being regarded as the principal verbs in the sentence, and ‘incertum’ merely as a sort of qualifying adverb, so that we need not follow Gossrau in putting a note of interrogation after ‘resedit.’
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.