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Horace, Epod. 6. 16
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 11 February 2009
Extract
caue, caue; namque in malos asperrimus
parata tollo cornua,
qualis Lycambae spretus infido gener
aut acer hostis Bupalo.
an, si quis atra dente me petiuerit,
inultus ut flebo puer?
Harrison observes that commentators translate ‘“inultus” not “unavenged” but “without taking revenge”, construing it with Horace as the subject of “flebo” and not with “puer”’, and he then asserts ‘This use of “inultus” is wholly unparalleled; the adjective is elsewhere always used passively of persons or objects unavenged and never in the active sense of “unavenging”’.
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References
1 Keller, O. [ed.], Q. Horati Flacci Opera i 2 (Leipzig, 1899), 303, ad locGoogle Scholar.
2 Since I have been asked by a reader to elucidate the sense and the construction of this clause, I may say that both the immediate context and the imitation by Claudian indicate that ‘inultus’ goes with ‘flebo’, not with ‘puer’; cf. standard commentaries such as those of Orelli, Kiessling and Heinze, and Lucian Müller, ad he. I do not know offhand of an exact parallel to the hyperbaton ‘inultus ut flebopuer’, but cf. Serm. 1. 4. 142–3 ‘ac ueluti te Iudaei cogemus in hanc concedere turbam’, 2. 1. 39–41 ‘hie stilus……me ueluti custodietensisuagina tectus’, and 2. 3. 109–10 ‘nescius uti compositis metuensque uelut contingere sacrum’. Numerous examples of far more extreme hyperbata were collected byHousman, A. E., JPh 18 (1890), 6–8Google Scholar, CR 11 (1897), 428–9Google Scholar, CR 14 (1900), 38Google Scholar, CR 20 (1906), 39 and 258Google Scholar, JPh 30 (1907), 246Google Scholar; for still more examples consult the indices to his editions of Manilius, Lucan, and Juvenal.
3 I want it to be clearly understood that I am not saying that any odd expression or bad grammar in Horace may well be authentic; I am rather contending that before one impugns the transmitted text, one should first search for parallels, or failing them, analogues.