Patrick Roper wrote (inter alia, in a long and interesting post): >The first line I read was "Nox erat et terris animalia somnus >habebant," strikingly similar to my earlier experience and the way I had >expressed it (only much better). > >As far as I am aware, I was not familiar with this line, though it may be >lodged somewhere deep in my unconscious. However, I am sure the idea of the >living earth sleeping is threaded through our culture.
May I raise a pedantic objection? Patrick's phrase "the idea of the living earth sleeping" is brilliantly evocative, but it seems to me that the Virgilian line conveys something different. The earth's living creatures are sleeping, not the earth itself. Patrick has transferred the epithet (which is implicit in Latin, explicit only in the translation). His transferred epithet is legitimate enough, no doubt, because the phrase exactly conveys the feeling of a poetic nightpiece---which, by the way, I'm sure must be a form antedating Virgil, but I can't cite examples. And it's singular habebat. Sleep has (possesses) the living creatures of the earth. But habebant was no doubt a mere fumble on the keyboard. Simon Cauchi <[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
