>More humour in Vergil "invitus, regina, tuo de litore cessi" (Bk 6) >reference to Catullus' Lock of Berenice "invitus, regina, tuo de cervice >cessi", a singularly incongruous intertextualism at a singularly inapposite >moment.
I have always thought "invitus, regina" to be as bad as W. S. Gilbert's "a thing of shreds and patches". But a closer analogy would be if The Yeoman of the Guard were an Elizabethan operetta and Hamlet a 19th cent. tragedy, so that we would find fault with Shakespeare's line rather than Gilbert's. Or rather, as Fletcher puts it better, the sense of incongruity is "much as we should feel if we came upon a line from Pope's Rape of the Lock in Keats' Hyperion". I don't think Virgil intended the line to be humorous, though. Despite the source from which it is taken, the effect is pathetic (I mean, pathos is the intended effect). Isn't it? Aeneas does express a sense of desperation in this speech, and there's always something a bit ridiculous about any male -- let alone an epic hero -- making excuses and vowing he had no choice in the matter. But I suspect there is a bimillennial cultural gulf here (as in so much else to do with the Aeneid), and that interpretation is necessarily uncertain. Simon Cauchi, Freelance Editor and Indexer Hamilton, New Zealand <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> ----------------------------------------------------------------------- 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
