Aulus Gellius, Attic Nights
John C. Rolfe, Ed.

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[p. 183] Besides all this, Virgil seemed to have left out the flower of the whole passage, by giving only a faint shadow of this verse of Homer's:

And shone transcendent o'er the beauteous train. ¹

For no greater or more complete praise of beauty can be expressed than that she alone excelled where all were beautiful, that she alone was easily distinguished from all the rest.

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X

[10arg] The low and odious criticism with which Annaeus Cornutus befouled the lines of Virgil in which the poet with chaste reserve spoke of the intercourse of Venus and Vulcan.

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THE poet Annianus, ² and with him many other devotees of the same Muse, extolled with high and constant praise the verses of Virgil in which, while depicting and describing the conjugal union of Vulcan and Venus, an act that nature's law bids us conceal, he veiled it with a modest paraphrase. For thus he wrote: ³

So speaking, the desired embrace he gave,
And sinking on the bosom of his spouse,
Calm slumber then he wooed in every limb.

But they thought it less difficult, in speaking of such a subject, to use one or two words that suggest it by a slight and delicate hint, such as Homer's παρθενίη ζώνη, or “maiden girdle”; ⁴ λέκτροιο θεσμόν, “the right of the couch”; ⁵ and ἔργα φιλοτήσια, “love's labours”; ⁶ that no other than Virgil has ever spoken of those sacred mysteries of chaste intercourse in so