EMENDATIONES TIBVLLIANAE I

Abstract Conjectures are made on the text of three passages in Tibullus, Books 1–2: 1.4.26 hastam … suam for crines … suos, 2.1.56 membra for bache, 2.4.60 aliis rebus for alias herbas.

For passages discussed I give the text of Luck's second edition (with his obeli), including his sigla and apparatus criticus, to which I append some forgotten conjectures.

I
Jupiter allows lovers to break their oaths with impunity (1.4.21-6): 'nec iurare time: Veneris periuria uenti irrita per terras et freta summa ferunt.gratia magna Ioui: uetuit pater ipse ualere, iurasset cupide quicquid ineptus amor: perque suas impune sinit Dictynna sagittas 25 affirmes †crines † perque Minerua suos.' 24 crines Z+ : clipeos Santen : cristas Mitscherlich : gryphes uel gryphas Rigler 'Great thanks be to Jupiter: the father himself annuls whatever foolish love should rashly aver.Diana allows you to swear by her arrows with impunity, Minerva by her hair.'Suspicion is justly cast on crines, for it is not easy to see why a lover, least of all a perjurious lover, should wish to aver his affection by invoking as a witness-of all things-the 'hair' of Minerva.That Minerva was fond of her hair is not in doubt: her turning the locks of Medusa, who had preferred her own to the goddess', into snakes is testament enough to that. 3 But whether it was the sort of attribute whereby a lover could swear, whether it stood in the same relation to Minerva as the bow and arrow to Diana, is very far from certain.Commentators are at a loss for a parallel. 4'Iuratur per id quod utrique deae carissimum,' says Dissen, 'quo contemto maxime irascitur quaeque; sitne ea corporis pars an telum, quid refert?poena ut eo ipso sumatur, per quod peieratum, non opus est.' 5 This is a perfectly reasonable inference, but it does not square neatly with the actual practice of oath-swearing in elegy.Lovers in this genre usually swear by (one of) two things: by something they are willing to lose if they perjure themselves, and by something to ensure that they lose it in such an event. 6A lover swears by his own hair, 7 and expects to lose it if the oath is broken; he does not swear by the hair of a divine witness.This conception of the lover's oath is most fully worked out by Ovid in Amores 3.3, where it is parodied extensively.There his mistress, having first sworn an oath by all of her most attractive qualities (3-4 long hair, 5-6 rosy cheeks, 7-8 dainty feet, 9-10 sparkling eyes) and then broken it, is permitted-contrary to expectation-3 Commentators (n. 1) have tended to adduce Servius Danielis on Verg.Aen.6.289 to substantiate this point, but cf. also  Murgatroyd (n.1), 140 compares oaths sworn by Zeus's head and Caesar's head, the rays of the sun, and the song of the Fates, but 'can find no exact parallel for an oath by her [Minerva's] hair'.Heyne (n.1), 49 offers up Prop.2.28.11-12, yet there the girl is not swearing by Minerva's eyes but rather denying their beauty, which is 'a different kind of offence from that mentioned in verse 8 [quidquid iurarunt, uentus et unda rapit]', according to S.J. Heyworth, Cynthia: A Companion to the Text of Propertius (Oxford, 2007), 232.
not to lose but to keep them, whereas Ovid, because she swore by his eyes also, feels the hurt in his own.When in Am. 3. Minerva's hair is not only unparalleled as an attribute on which to swear an oath; it is not even of the same class as those attributes which are actually sworn upon. 9Hence Merli, the only modern scholar besides Luck who seems to acknowledge the oddness of crines, is moved to regard it as intentionally humorous. 10Swearing by the hair of Minerva-upon this theory-is a behaviour illustrative of the 'foolish love' of lines 23-4: the lover in his eagerness swears upon whatever first comes to mind (24 iurasset cupide quicquid ineptus amor), and the first thing that here comes to mind, after the arrows of Dictynna, is the hair of Minerva.But with Merli's explanation come two problems.First, if Minerva's hair is acknowledged to be a ridiculous attribute to swear by, then the oath by which it is sworn ought to be accounted as weak or worthless (cf.Ov.Rem.am.783-4).But if a lover's oath were weak or worthless because he had picked a ridiculous attribute for a witness, Jupiter would have no reason to intervene, and the special exception he makes for lovers (23-4) would not be in request.In truth, the 'foolishness' of love consists, as commentators have long remarked, in choosing to swear by two goddesses who by reason of their own castitas uirginalis would be least disposed to forgive the breaking of a lover's oath-not in swearing by an abnormal attribute of one of those two goddesses. 11Second, if it were Tibullus' intention to index some of the strange attributes on which heedless lovers swear, one wonders why he did not assign an equally irreverent item to Diana (her crura, for example).crines has been explained in other ways.Acknowledging that a parallel to sagittas is required to give force to impune in line 25, Huschke wondered if crines might be a metonym for the plume of Minerva's helmet. 12This is quite impossible.crinis by itself sometimes signifies the material from which a plume is made but never the crest of the helmet itself (cf.E. Lommatzsch, TLL 4.1202.78-1203.2).Moreover, this special use of crinis is usually clarified by context, as in Sil.Pun.5.133-4 cui uertice surgens | triplex crista iubas effundit crine Sueuo, where the hair clearly belongs to a plumed helmet.Finally, it is not easy to see how a plume might be put to the use of punishing a liar.This last objection holds for Mitscherlich's cristas and for all other conjectures so far made upon this passage. 13he fact is that, if Tibullus wished to specify a genuinely threatening attribute of Minerva, he would have written hastam … suam. 14That he did is entirely possible.Not only is Minerva's spear a weapon like Diana's arrows; it is also the only attribute of hers which I have found persons in Latin poetry to swear by (cf.Juv.13.82), and, if read here, would enable line 26 to constitute the line parodied at Ov. Am. 3.3.28. 15The distance travelled by crines from the letters of hastam is contrasted by its closeness to those of the tail-end of affirmes.If a copyist committed an error of dittography, writing, say, affirmes firmes for affirmes hastam, a later scribe could well have changed this into affirmes crines (m = ın), writing suos for suam as a matter of course.Such errors are not uncommon in Tibullus' manuscripts: cf.1.1.50terre ferre (cod.Parisinus lat.8233) in error for tristes ferre (Z+), 1.4.42 arenti t ̣ọṛṛẹṇṭị torreat (V) in error for arenti torreat (AGX+), 1.5.11sulpure puro (Z+) in error for sulpure uiuo (Heinsius, Broukhusius), 1.10.14telit gerit (H) for tela gerit (Z+). 16The anonymous reader suggests, alternatively, that hastam was first corrupted to castam, owing to the frequent collocation of this adjective with Minerva (cf.Prop.3.20.7;Ov.Am. 1.7.18;Ilias  Latina 78, 333, 532, 894), and then deliberately emended by a scribe to crines.(Potsdam, 1839-1844), 1.14-15, could, I suppose, be put to the use of enforcing an oath, but angues/-is (or hydras or colubros, as the referee suggests) would be more emblematic of the goddess (cf.Ov.Met.4.802-3; Stat.Theb.2.597, 8.517-18; Claud.Carm.8.162-4).
'The farmer, wearied by constant ploughing, was first to chant rustic words in regular metre, first to play on the oaten pipe a song to sing before decorated gods.And the farmer, drenched with ruddy cinnabar, Bacchus, first led the dance with inexpert skill.'To what speaker should be attributed the sudden exclamation of Bacche in line 55?To the farmer?But there is no ait or inquit to mark the attribution.Then to Tibullus?Cries of (euhoe) Bacche are the sort of thing one expects to hear from a Dionysian reveller, and a Dionysian revel is indeed what many believe to be here under discussion. 17But Tibullus does not pose as a participant of this festival; he poses as its narrator, and it is not in the style of a narrator to make strange and wild ejaculations of this kind.True, Bacchus is invoked along with Ceres at the beginning of this elegy.But there his presence is welcomed by a second-person pronoun and imperative (3-4): Bacche, ueni, dulcisque tuis e cornibus uua pendeat, et spicis tempora cinge, Ceres.
When a list of particulars is closed by a noun qualified by mille alii, these words always specify the class to which the items on said list belong, never further items from that class: Sen. Contr.3.16 laqueus, gladius, praeceps locus, uenenum, naufragium, mille aliae mortes; Celsus, Med.1.pr.41 metu, dolore, inedia, cruditate, lassitudine, mille aliis mediocribus adfectibus, 3.21.2famem, sitim, et mille alia taedia; Sen. Dial.9.5.3 petulantiam, inuidiam, mille alia inertia uitia.We should therefore cast a second glance at herbas in line 60, since it appears to violate this pattern by failing to constitute a class able to comprehend all the items on its list; for uenenum (55) and hippomanes (57-8) are not 'herbs' with which a thousand 'others' (alias) may be mixed. 25A second reason to suspect the text of this passage is its ambiguous syntax.Murgatroyd remarks that quicquid … ueneni (55), quicquid … herbarum (56) and Hippomanes (57-8) can be taken as objects either of misceat (along with mille alias herbas in asyndeton) or of bibam (mille alias herbas misceat illa standing in parenthesis). 26The grammar could be disambiguated by making mille alias herbas into an ablative or dative noun phrase, mille aliis herbis, and thus tying the ingredients of lines 55-8 only to misceat: 'let her mix poison, herbs and hippomanes with a thousand other herbs: provided my Nemesis looks on me kindly, I shall drink.'But merely changing the case will not solve our first problem: a more generic noun than herbas/-is is required to comprehend all the ingredients of lines 55-8.Sprengel was the first to see that an ablative was needed here; he was also one of the first to notice the need for a noun other than herbis. 27His philtris however will not do the job: uenenum, herba and hippomanes are related to philtrum not as species to genus (as in the four examples of mille alii given at the start of this note) but as simples to a compound.A philtre is what Nemesis is making; one does not brew a philtre out of 'poison, herbs, hippomanes and a thousand other philtres'.Changing alias to a different adjective, such as Valckenaer's malas herbas (or malis herbis), is a solution still less attractive, since it would leave intact the unimaginative repetition of herbas after herbarum in line 56 at the expense of removing an interesting and well-established idiom in mille alias/-is. 28Heyne's malos succos (or aliis succis) is better, but strays further from the paradosis than one would like, and it may be doubted whether 'juice' is sufficiently generic to comprehend the Thessalian herbs of line 56. 29All these emendations are in any case vitiated by the un-Tibullian homoeoteleuton in -īs, -ās or -ōs. 30Since the true reading is yet to seek, I conjecture aliis rebus. 31Ovid employs this very phrase to close the list of ingredients of Medea's magic potion in Met.7.262-76; cf.lines  273-6:   quibus insuper addit oua caputque nouem cornicis saecula passae.his et mille aliis postquam sine nomine rebus 275 propositum instruxit.
A variant of this expression, in which alius is used as a neuter substantive (mille alia, 'a thousand other things'), appears in Livy 29.18.7,Quint.Inst.1.4.13,1.6.25,2.15.23,  9.3.1, and Apul.Apol.54.This would suggest that mille aliis rebus is a weightier version of a common idiom, and not therefore a weak or colourless phrase on which to end the catalogue. 32Further support for rebus is furnished by Manilius 5.468 mille alias rerum species in carmina ducent, where the superfluity of rerum is scarcely less objectionable than the seeming plainness of rebus.How this turned into herbas is not hard to imagine.A scribe with herbarum fluttering before his brain wrote aliis herbis when he meant to say aliis rebus; this was later changed into alias herbas by a copyist who losing track of the syntax sought an object for misceat.

MAXWELL HARDY
Trinity College, Oxford maxwell.hardy@trinity.ox.ac.uk 31 The anonymous reader would write aliis or etiam uerbis, comparing Verg.G. 3.282-3.But if aliis is retained, then uerbis encounters the same problem that herbis, philtris and sucis all face, namely that herbae and hippomanes are not 'incantations' with which 'other' incantations may be mixed (aliis cannot be additive for reasons explained in n. 25 above).To save uerbis one must then write etiam as well, but then one is departing further from the ductus litterarum, further at any rate than with rebus, which solves all the same problems at lower cost. 32Ovid may have felt that he was improving on Tibullus by adding sine nomine to his mille aliis … rebus.