[429] Repeated 11. 28. Muretus V. L. 13. 2 explains this line by a reference to a custom of burying those who had died prematurely before daybreak, the calamity being thought too great for the sun to look upon—an explanation which, when taken in connexion with the illustration discovered in v. 427, is perhaps not hastily to be rejected, though of course it cannot be applied to 11. 28. If we take ‘atra dies’ in its ordinary sense, it may be modelled on the various uses of ἦμαρ in Hom. ‘Mergere’ of plunging in doom vv. 512, 615. ‘Acerbus’ is specially used of untimely death, as in Cic. (?) De Domo Sua c. 16, quoted by Forc., “funus etsi miserum atque acerbum fuisset,” like “crudus.”
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.