Abstract

Few editors of Virgil have given these last three words a satisfactory sense: none, to my knowledge, has fully recognized their difficulty. The root of the trouble lies in the Roman repugnance for limiting words to a single, specialized, technical sense: licium and tela are, consequently, found with a variety of different meanings. Notwithstanding this difficulty, however, I hope to show that this passage has a meaning that is both simple and unambiguous.