[569] ‘Has put off to the late hour of death,’ not a strictly accurate expression, as Virg. means not a death-bed confession, but a suppression of guilt till it is revealed in the other world. ‘Piaculum’ of a crime is as old as Ennius and Plautus, see Forc. Its use here may be meant to suggest that the confession has been delayed till earthly expiation is too late, at the same time that it suits ‘distulit,’ as what is really put off is not the crime but the confession and atonement. Expiation must now be made in the lower world.
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.