[283] “Opaca, ingens” 3. 619. The notion of dreams perched like birds on a tree Heyne traces to Il. 14. 286 foll., where Sleep, taking the form of a bird, perches on one of the trees of Ida, before coming down upon Zeus. Virg. may mean that the dreams are actually in the form of birds, as Henry thinks, comp. Sil. 13. 595 foll., who, imitating this passage, represents a yew on the banks of Cocytus as peopled by noisome birds. ‘Volgo’ may go either with ‘ferunt’ or with ‘tenere:’ but the latter seems more forcible. Wagn. comp. 3. 643, “habitant ad litora volgo.” In Od. 24. 12 the δῆμος Ὀνείρων is reached before the shades.
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.