Medium iter is not to be pressed, merely meaning that he had got well on his way. Most of the instances quoted however for this loose use of the word are scarcely in point, e.g. G. 3. 486, 519, where though all that the context requires is that the operation spoken of should have begun, there is no reason why it should not have been exactly half finished at the time mentioned. In other words, Virg. assumes for rhetorical purposes that the thing is half done, an assumption which here is contrary to the fact, while there, for aught we know, it may be consistent with it. 4. 277 is nearer the mark, as we can hardly suppose that Mercury ceased to be visible in the middle of his speech, so that we may say that there the word stands for something more than half, as here for something less than half. ‘Tenere iter’ 2. 359.
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.