At 06:30 PM 3/23/2004 +0000, Leofranc Holford-Strevens wrote: >It is not in the least absurd to suggest that Vergil avoided inflected >forms he did not like; why else, in the fourth Georgic, does he never >speak of bees in the genitive plural, than because neither apium nor >apum sounded right to him? It is not a matter of grammatical difficulty, >rather elegance of taste.
Cf. "Cuium pecus" for "Cuius pecus" in Ecl. 3.1: according to Servius, Virgil used the archaic form for two reasons: because the speaker is a rustic, and because he wanted to avoid repetition. ----------------------------------------------------------------------- David Wilson-Okamura http://virgil.org [EMAIL PROTECTED] East Carolina University Virgil reception, discussion, documents, &c ----------------------------------------------------------------------- ----------------------------------------------------------------------- To leave the Mantovano mailing list at any time, do NOT hit reply. Instead, send email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with the message "unsubscribe mantovano" in the body (omitting the quotation marks). You can also unsubscribe at http://virgil.org/mantovano/mantovano.htm#unsub
