[319] “Exercent vomere collis” 7. 798. For ‘pascunt’ (which = “ut pascuis utuntur”) comp. an inscription in the Berlin Corpus Inscriptionum, vol. i. No. 199, l. 40, “Prata quae fuerint proxuma faenisecei . . . . quem quisque eorum agrum posidebit, invitis eis niquis sicet nive pascat nive fruatur.” Forc. quotes a passage from Martial (10. 58. 9), “Dura suburbani dum iugera pascimus agri,” which he understands of cultivating the land under difficulty, so that the cultivator rather maintains it than is maintained by it. But though the meaning would not be unsuitable, the expression is too recondite for a passage like this, and it may be said that ‘horum asperrima’ prepares us for some operation distinct from ploughing. To take ‘asperrima’ as nom. would be possible, but not likely. Rom. has the two first letters of ‘pascunt’ written over an erasure.
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. and Henry Nettleship, M.A. London. Whittaker and Co., Ave Maria Lane;. George Bell and Sons, York Street, Covent Garden. 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.