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THE STRANGE ABSENCE OF HORT- IN LUCRETIUS
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 09 January 2024
Abstract
This note points out and ventures to explain the remarkable absence of both hortus, ‘garden’, and all forms of hortari, ‘urge’, in a poem that seeks to encourage the audience toward the Garden.
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- Copyright © The Author(s), 2024. Published by Cambridge University Press on behalf of The Classical Association
References
1 ‘Fields’, ‘small plot’, ‘garden’, ‘vineyard’, ‘grain field’, ‘tracts’.
2 Perhaps Lucretius wishes to avoid hortus since it can carry the sense of sexually receptive orifice, as in Priapea 5.4. Still, he employs agellus, a term used in an identically obscene way in Priapea 15.7. For other field and garden innuendo, see Adams, J.N., The Latin Sexual Vocabulary (Baltimore, 1982), 82–4CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
3 D. Marković, The Rhetoric of Explanation in Lucretius’ De rerum natura (Leiden, 2008), 147.
4 Maltby, R., A Lexicon of Ancient Latin Etymologies (Leeds, 1991)Google Scholar, s.v. hortus.
5 For similar types of wordplay and double entendre, see Snyder, M., Puns and Poetry in Lucretius’ De rerum natura (Amsterdam, 1980), 108–21Google Scholar.
6 Snyder (n. 5), 108.
7 Vaan, M. de, Etymological Dictionary of Latin and the other Italic Languages (Leiden, 2008)Google Scholar, s.v. horior.
8 See Schiesaro, A., ‘The palingenesis of De rerum natura’, PCPhS 40 (1994), 81–107Google Scholar, especially 92.
9 The only other near candidate is the neuter singular nominative exortum agreeing with genus at 1.4–5. Here too there is a sense of hortus near at hand with sunlight (lumina solis) and crop-bearing lands (terras frugiferentis, 1.3–5).