[663] Serv. seems right (in spite of Wagn.'s denial) in explaining ‘obtruncat’ “obtruncare consuevit.” It was Pyrrhus' only act of the kind; but it agreed so thoroughly with his nature that it would stamp him ever afterwards. He is the butcher of son and father, says Aeneas: therefore doubt not that he will butcher us. ‘Obtruncet,’ the original reading of the Mentelian MS. which Heins. thinks more Virgilian, would give a different sense. ‘Ad aras’ is meant to deepen the horror as well as ‘ante ora patris.’ For ‘patrem qui’ Med. and others give ‘patremque,’ clearly a false reading, though supported by Jahn. Med. also gives the spelling ‘gnatum,’ which I have followed Wagn. in restoring, though with some hesitation, as I have no confidence in his notion that Virg. used the archaic form in grander and more solemn passages, the modern in an ordinary context.
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.