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‘The Single Supplie’: Some Observations on Zeugma with Particular Reference to Vergil1

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  04 July 2014

Sara Mack
Sara Mack*
Affiliation:
University of North Carolina
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Writers from Homer to O. Henry have used it. Critics from Servius to Bömer have commented on it. Students of rhetoric from Quintilian to Laussberg have analysed it. Yet there is very little agreement about what zeugma is and what it does. Some editors note its existence and leave it at that. Others distinguish (sometimes passionately) between zeugma and syllepsis, zeugma and equivoque, zeugma and attelage, zeugma and plokē, zeugma and amphibole. Therefore I shall do well to clarify at the start my own use of the term.

It is probably best to begin by distinguishing between a group of figures (most commonly called zeugma or syllepsis) which link several notions into one, and another group (hendiadys and related figures) which expand one concept by expressing it in two ways or from two points of view. Zeugma implies yoking (zeugnumi), two or more elements joined so as to make a team. The yoked words are in some way incongruous — perhaps abstract linked with concrete, animate with inanimate, or physical with mental — and the resulting team is, accordingly, both surprising and noteworthy, rather as if a horse were yoked with an ox.

Type
Research Article
Information
Ramus , Volume 9 , Issue 2 , 1980 , pp. 101 - 111
Copyright
Copyright © Aureal Publications 1980

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Footnotes

1.

George Puttenham, The Arte of English Poesie, ed. Willcock and Walker (Cambridge, 1936, repr. 1978), 163.

References

NOTES

2. Cf. Page, T. E. (ed.), The Aeneid of Virgil I-VI (London, 1957) ad II.258Google Scholar: ‘Notice the Zeugma.’

3. Kenney, E. J., CR n.s. 22 (1972), 38–42 Google Scholar.

4. Lussky, Ernest A., ‘Misapplications of the Term Zeugma’, CJ 48 (1953), 285ffGoogle Scholar.

5. Morier, Henri, Dictionnaire de Poétique et de Rhétorique (Paris, 1961), 481–83Google Scholar.

6. P. Ovidius Naso Metamorphosen, ed. Ehwald, Rudolf, repr. (with corrections) von Albrecht, M. (1915, repr. Zurich, 1966) ad IX. 135Google Scholar. This is the text of the Metamorphoses cited throughout.

7. Kenney, above n.3.

8. I shall cite the text of the OCT (ed. R. A. B., Mynors, Oxford, 1972) throughout this essay with no changes except ‘v’ for consonantal ‘u’.

9. Some scholars would not agree with this classification. Austin, R. G., for example, P. Vergili Maronis Aeneidos Liber Secundus (Oxford, 1964 Google Scholar) doubts that this is a hendiadys. He also calls ‘mannerisms’ many of the figures I call zeugma. See ad II.378 and elsewhere.

10. Page (above n. 2) calls it ‘a sort of hendiadys’; Conington, The Works of Virgil with a Commentary (repr. Hildesheim, 1963) ‘almost … a hendiadys’. Williams, R. D., The Aeneid of Virgil (London, 1972 Google Scholar), on the other hand, calls it ‘a marked zeugma of the verb immittet’, and Papillon, T. L. P. Vergili Maronis Opera (Oxford, 1882 Google Scholar), ‘a bold poetical phrase which hardly admits of comment or illustration’.

11. Also questionable is haec loca vi quondam et vasta convulsa ruina (‘This place was once devastated by force and utter destruction’, Aen. III.414) — is the juxtaposition of vi and vasta ruina to be thought of as a joining (zeugma) or as a separation, more or less equivalent to vi vastae ruinae (hendiadys)? See my Patterns of Time in Vergil (Hamden, 1978 Google Scholar), App. I, for a brief discussion of the question.

12. The Poems of Alexander Pope, ed. Butt, John (New Haven, 1963 CrossRefGoogle Scholar).

13. Don Juan, ed. Marchand, Leslie A. (Cambridge, Mass., 1958 Google Scholar).

14. Vergil occasionally uses a preposition as the link: ferrum acuant portis in me excidiumque meorum (Aen. VIII.386), against me, for the destruction of my friends. See 104 and 108-9 below for his use of an adjective or participle as the link.

15. Austin, R. G., P. Vergili Maronis Aeneidos Liber Primus (Oxford, 1971 Google Scholar), calls it ‘a compression for “royal power and Iuppiter's favour’”.

16. Cf. Ehwald/von Albrecht (above n.6) ad loc.

17. See Anderson, W. S., Ovid's Metamorphoses 6-10 (Norman, Oklahoma, 1972 Google Scholar) for helpful comments on this and other Ovidian zeugmas.

18. Cf. iura magistratusque legunt (‘they select laws and magistrates’, Aen. I.426) and moresque viris et moenia ponet (‘he will set up customs and walls for his people’, Aen. I.264).

19. Cf. Williams (above n.10) ad loc. I do not, however, think that numen refers to a statue.

20. Charles Dickens, cited from McCartney, Eugene S., ‘Zeugma in Vergil's Aeneid and in English’, PQ 8 (1929), 80 Google Scholar. He did not know which novel and I have not been able to find it either. Similar is O. Henry's ‘running season … for farmers, shad, maple trees and the Connemaugh river,’ The Gentle Grafter (New York, 1922), 33 Google Scholar.

21. A short step from the merely absurd end of the zeugmatic spectrum brings us to zeugmas like Byron's ‘[Donna Julia] was married, charming, chaste and twenty-three.’ (Don Juan I.lix) and Dickens' ‘All the girls were in tears and white muslin’, The Pickwick Papers (Harmondsworth, 1972), 467 Google Scholar, both funny but not absurd, both managing, through their yoking of unlike concepts, poignantly to suggest youth, innocence and fragility. Pope, in The Rape of the Lock, exploits the satiric possibilities of witty zeugma and makes it a much more integral part of his work than Ovid or Byron or Dickens did. Pope's zeugmas tell us a great deal about the values of Belinda and her friends, who don't seem to distinguish between people and pets (‘Men, Monkies, Lap-dogs, Parrots, perish all!’ IV. 120); between husbands and lap-dogs (‘Not louder Shrieks to pitying Heav'n are cast,/When Husbands or when Lap-dogs breathe their last,’ III. 157-58); and, more tellingly still, between husbands and objects (‘or when rich China Vessels, fal'n from high,/In glittering Dust and painted Fragments lie!’ III. 159-60). What a comment on Belinda's society, that husbands and lap-dogs, poor souls, must expire in one line, while Chinese jars are allowed a whole couplet!

22. Cf. R. G. Austin (above n.15) ad loc.

23. ed. F. Eyssenhardt (Leipzig, 1893).

24. Page (above n.2) ad loc. states that this is not zeugma but hendiadys because of the word order. He feels that it would be classifiable as zeugma if Vergil had written vino somnoque. It seems to me to be zeugma in either case because its main function is to link.

25. See Austin (above n.9) ad loc. for a slightly different interpretation.

26. The zeugmas of Vergil's most important epic successor, Milton, belong at this end of the spectrum. Zeugma is not as important an element in Paradise Lost as it is in the Aeneid, but it does occur and has a Vergilian flavor when it does appear. See for example Milton's equation of Satan, on the point of tempting Eve, with a city dweller leaving the city (IX.445-47): ‘As one who long in populous City pent/Where Houses thick and Sewers annoy the Air,/Forth issuing …’ (Milton, John, Complete Poems and Major Prose, ed. Hughes, [Indianapolis, 1957]Google Scholar).

27. How different is Vergil's version of anagnorisis: cf. Dido's recognition of Sychaeus' fate (above 106-7).