Earlier this week someone on Ficino asked about the spelling of Virgil's name. Peter Herman came up with the following, which I share with you here. (I suspect Sylvester, cited below, is wrong about American practice, but that's not very important.)
- David Wilson-Okamura ---------------------------------------------------------------- Date: Wed, 21 Jul 1999 23:46:51 -0400 From: "Peter C. Herman" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> Subject: Re: Vergil/Virgil To: [EMAIL PROTECTED] I'm hardly an expert on this, but the following might be of interest. In his De fructo qui ex doctrina percipitur (The Benefit of a Liberal Education [1517]), the Henrician humanist, failed author and diplomat, Richard Pace, recounts a converstion he had with another humanist, who refers to the contributions to learning given by the recovery of certain Roman marbles: "Dear Bombasius, I love you for those Marbles," Pace said. "God knows,I put more faith in them than I do in all our new grammarians. For just as they made a mistake about this, they could do the same about other things, and we need only an ancient inscription to understand the truth. For it was an inscription that taught Angelus Politianus to write *Vergil* and not *Virgil,* which was the way it was usually spelled for five hundred years before. God only knows what we owe to inscriptions." The editor of my edition, Richard Sylvester, gives the following note: For the spelling of Vergil, see Politian's Miscellanea, I.lxxvii (Opera, Paris 1512, I sig. Rfv): Quo argumento dicendum Vergilius: non Virgilius," where he mentions several ancient inscriptions "que . . in marmore inveniuntur" with the "e" spelling. Today *Vergil* is the preferred American spelling, *Virgil* the preferred British. ----------------------------------------------------------------------- David Wilson-Okamura http://www.virgil.org [EMAIL PROTECTED] University of Chicago Online Virgil discussion, bibliography & links ----------------------------------------------------------------------- ----------------------------------------------------------------------- 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
