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Weather-Signs in Virgil1

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  05 January 2009

L. A. S. Jermyn
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Extract

PART 1

Collecting of weather-signs must have been a practice of considerable antiquity, for man has always drawn his sustenance from the land or from beasts that convert vegetable into animal protein. A hunter must know the best times for hunting; and for the agriculturist it is essential not only to know when the average seasonal changes of weather occur but to have some means of forecasting variations from the normal. We know two Greek collections of weather-signs, and there may have been a third which was older than either of these. Eudoxus of Cnidus, a pupil of Plato and a distinguished mathematician who lived about 390–337 b.c., had written a prose work on astronomy, entitled Phaenomena. This, at the request of Antigonus of Macedon, was put into verse, under the same title, by Aratus of Soli somewhere between 276 and 274 b.c. The Phaenomena of Aratus is a dull, pretentious piece of versification, of interest to us only because it contains a number of seasonal signs which Virgil has scattered about the Georgics. But the astronomical piece is followed by a passage of 422 lines, which has been given the independent title of Diosemiai or Diosemeiai, on the signs of less normal weather. This is undoubtedly the principal source of Virgil's main collection; and from it, therefore, I shall chiefly be quoting. But there does exist another work, Concerning the Signs of Rain, Wind, Storm, and Fair Weather, a prose work in the form of some twenty pages of notes.

Type
Research Article
Information
Greece & Rome , Volume 20 , Issue 58 , January 1951 , pp. 26 - 37
Copyright
Copyright © The Classical Association 1951

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References

page 27 note 1 See The Road to Xanadu, by Lowes, J. L..Google Scholar

page 28 note 1 Printed in Greece and Rome, June 1949.Google Scholar

page 29 note 1 Diosemeiai 177–80; De Signis, § 29.

page 29 note 2 Ablative of saepes.

page 30 note 1 Georgics i. 356–9.

page 31 note 1 i.e. where Cicero uses two words meaning a particular sound, or Aratus repeats a general word for sound, Virgil, through his rhythm, conveys to us the sound itself.

page 31 note 2 Diosemeiai 181–97.

page 32 note 1 Cf. Lucr. ii. 206–7.

page 32 note 2 Georgics i. 360–9.

page 33 note 1 Diosemeiai 201–4; Georgics i. 370–3.

page 34 note 1 The words used by the three poets, in the same positional emphasis, to describe the fall of meteorites, are worthy of comparison. ταρφἑα, in Aratus, has explosive force; ὰθρóoς, in Theocritus, has the whirring hiss of a single meteorite; Virgil's praecipites, with its plosive consonants and short syllables, has just the right sound of scattered falling.

page 34 note 2 Diosemeiai 299–300; De Signis, § 38.

page 34 note 3 Georgics i. 374–5.

page 34 note 4 Diosemeiai 206–7.

page 34 note 5 Georgics i. 397.

page 34 note 6 Diosemeiai 208.

page 34 note 7 Georgics i. 380–1.

page 35 note 1 De Signis, § 15; Diosemeiai 222–3; Georgics i. 375–6.

page 35 note 2 Diosemeiai 212–13; cf. De Signis, § 15.

page 35 note 3 Georgics i. 377.

page 35 note 4 De Signis, §§ 15 and 22; Diosemeiai 214–15 and 224–5; Georgics i. 378–80.

page 36 note 1 Cf. Georgics iii. 431.

page 36 note 2 Diosemeiai 290 and 294–5; Georgics i. 381–2.

page 36 note 3 Ibid. 383–7.

page 36 note 4 Iliad ii. 459–63.

page 37 note 1 Diosemeiai 217–21.

page 37 note 2 Georgics i. 288–9.

page 37 note 3 Diosemeiai 241–9; De Signis, §§ 14, 25, 34, 42, 54; Georgics i. 390–2.