[430] The meaning seems clear, that a separate place is assigned to those who have met their death by unjust condemnation. It has been asked why they should be made to suffer: but there is no suffering in this part of the shades; there is merely the absence of the enjoyment of life, the Homeric condition of the dead which Achilles declares to be worse than the lowest function on earth. That they should endure this is not unjust: the iniquity which dismissed them from life does not make their lives good or bad; that is decided by Minos, as we shall see immediately. We should expect however that they would not occupy this place permanently, but that on the rehearing of their case some would be despatched to Tartarus, others to Elysium. But Virg. does not say this, and if we compare the case of these persons with those of the infants and the suicides, we may doubt whether he intended it. Infants remain in their limbo apparently because they have had no opportunity of showing whether they were worthy of Elysium or of Tartarus; those who have cut short their own lives are not to be credited with the good or evil of their lives, but are consigned at once and for ever to a twilight condition like that imagined by Hom.: and so perhaps the victims of unjust sentences may be dealt with as those who having accidentally come into the state of death are exempted alike from reward and punishment. But we must not probe Virg.'s meaning too deeply: he has deserted the simplicity of Hom. for something far more complicated, and it is not surprising that in borrowing details from other sources he should have been led occasionally to combine inconsistencies. Warburton thought the reference here was to a story in Plato's Gorgias, pp. 523 foll., where the establishment of infernal judges is said to have been owing to the inequality of the sentences originally passed by living judges who had to decide the condition after death of those who were still in the body. Virg. may have thought of this: but his words are hardly reconcilable with it, as Warburton admits by his proposal to alter ‘crimine’ into ‘tempore.’ Virg. coincides with Plato in putting the place of judgment before the spot where the roads to Tartarus and Elysium diverge (vv. 540 foll.), and also in particularizing Minos, who according to Plato is a supreme judge of appeal, Asiatics being judged in the first instance by Rhadamanthus, Europeans by Aeacus. Virg. may also have thought of another passage in Plato, of which Cerda reminds us—that in the Apology, p. 41 B, where Socrates dwells on the pleasure of meeting in the shades those who, like himself, have died in consequence of an unjust sentence, εἴ τις τῶν παλαιῶν διὰ κρίσιν ἄδικον τέθνηκε, such as Palamedes and the greater Ajax, though it is clear that if Plato had been asked where he intended to place these, he would have replied, in Elysium. There still remains a difficulty about the construction, as ‘mortis’ may be connected either with ‘damnati’ or with ‘crimine.’ Perhaps in the absence of any instance of ‘crimen mortis’=“crimen capitale” (comp. “caussa capitis,” “iudicium capitis”), it will be safer to adopt the former, ‘damnatus’ with the gen. of the punishment being sufficiently common (see Forc. s. v.).
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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.
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