Hostname: page-component-77c89778f8-m42fx Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-07-17T18:23:37.306Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

Heroides 16.303–4

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  11 February 2009

Allan Kershaw
Allan Kershaw
Affiliation:
University of Illinois at Chicago
Get access Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

Extract

The several verbal responsions of this couplet to the preceding one are clear, and as mando produces mandata, so testor derives, I think, from testis. Read me teste ‘Idaei…’; ‘with me as witness…’. This reading adds greatly to the humour of the situation, where the hen is charged, in his presence, with caring for the fox. For testis as a witness to the audible (rather than the visible) cf. (e.g.) fors me sermoni testem dedit (Am. 1.8.21).

Type
Shorter Notes
Information
The Classical Quarterly , Volume 48 , Issue 1 , May 1998 , pp. 316
Copyright
Copyright © The Classical Association 1998

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

References

1 Kenney, E. J., Ovid: Heroides XVI—XXI(Cambridge, 1996). It is noteworthy, however, that Heyworth's ipse et 'utis accepted by G. Rosati (Milan, 1989).Google Scholar

2 The responsion teste... testoris, of course, purely verbal; as CQ'sanonymous referee notes, ‘the invocation implied in 305 is to heaven above, the powers in general...’

3 A statistic which I find interesting: in Heroides16–21 there are nine instances of testis,but in the earlier poems of the collection only one.