The Fifth Desk · Evaluation
Act I · The Map
Ovid · a poem in fifteen books · 11,927 lines of Latin hexameter in the edition read, completed about AD 8 · in Ovid’s Latin, with Riley’s literal prose (1851) for sense and Golding’s fourteeners (1567) for the English poem
Mode
Mythological epic as a continuous collection; cosmogony, love elegy, tragedy, comedy, philosophy and panegyric entered in turn
Mythos
Metamorphosis as the law of every episode; the body taken while the mind remains; the artist punished by the god; apotheosis as the last change
Phase
From chaos and the parting of the elements, through the loves of the gods and the age of heroes, Troy and Aeneas, to Caesar’s star and the poet’s own day
Presentation
Poem; fifteen books, 11,927 printed lines of dactylic hexameter, joined without a break by links of place, kin, theme and teller, with songs told inside songs three tellers deep
Register
From Polyphemus’ comparatives and the lead pipe of Pyramus to Niobe turning to stone; speech a third of the whole at least, three-fifths in the last book
Scale
The cosmos and all of mythic history, entered one body at a time
Governing Proposition
A poet undertakes to tell of bodies changed into new forms from the first beginning of the world to his own day, and carries every change, through fifteen books, without a break. The wager of the poem is that the self is a body that can be taken while the mind remains, that power silences and art is left as the witness, and that in a world where all things change and nothing perishes, the one thing exempt from change is the poem.
Act II · The Essay
Movement I
“In nova fert animus mutatas dicere formas / corpora; di, coeptis (nam vos mutastis et illas) / adspirate meis primaque ab origine mundi / ad mea perpetuum deducite tempora carmen.”
“My design leads me to speak of forms changed into new bodies. Ye Gods, (for you it was who changed them,) favor my attempts, and bring down the lengthened narrative from the very beginning of the world” (1.1 to 4). The proem is four lines, and the last of them holds the poem in small. The verb deducite, spin out fine, is the word for the slender, finished poem that Callimachus prized; perpetuum, continuous, names the long epic he scorned. The line joins them, and the poem keeps the paradox to its end: an epic in the metre of the Aeneid, written a generation after it, with no hero and no single action, entering every genre in turn.
Before there was sea or land or sky, unus erat toto naturae vultus in orbe, / quem dixere chaos (1.6 to 7): there was one face of nature in the whole world, and it was called chaos. In it nulli sua forma manebat (1.17), nothing kept its own form, until a god and a kinder nature set the elements apart. The poem’s first change is the world’s, told in the terms of Lucretius, and its last is the poet’s own, in its last nine lines. Between them nothing stops. The narrative passes from episode to episode by links of place, of kin, of theme and of teller, as bodies pass from shape to shape. Fifteen books stand in the edition read, 11,927 printed lines, the shortest the twelfth at 621 and the longest the thirteenth at 956.
The poem has given up the formula. One line in the whole of it occurs twice, multorumque fuit spes invidiosa procorum, she was the envied hope of many suitors, said of Medusa and of Deianira (4.795, 9.10). By the same count a hundred and one lines of the Aeneid recur, and more than thirteen in every hundred of the Iliad’s. The verse elides at less than half Virgil’s rate, and a third of it at least is speech, rising to three-fifths in the last book. Its tellers nest. Calliope’s song, 321 lines in the fifth book, is reported by a Muse to Minerva inside the poet’s narrative, three tellers deep; Orpheus’ song in the tenth, 592 lines, holds Venus’ tale to Adonis inside it. The sound of the hexameter is beyond this reading, and nothing here rests on how the verse is heard.
Movement II
The first man changed in the poem is a king who served human flesh to a god. Lycaon flees, howls, tries to speak, and “fit lupus et veteris servat vestigia formae.”
“he becomes a wolf, and he still retains vestiges of his ancient form.” (1.237). The grey hair is the same, the violence of the face the same, eadem feritatis imago est (1.239), the same image of savagery. The change does not make him something else; it shows what he was. The close of that line returns for the rock that was Lichas, which servat vestigia formae (9.227), and in sixteen places the phrase nunc quoque, even now, marks a trait that has outlasted its change: a flint still called the informer (2.706), the dawn’s tears still falling as dew over the whole world (13.622).
Lycaon’s crime brings the Flood, and the poem rises to it: “Iamque mare et tellus nullum discrimen habebant: / omnia pontus erant; deerant quoque litora ponto.”
“And now sea and land had no mark of distinction; everything now was ocean; and to that ocean shores were wanting.” (1.291 to 292). Twelve lines later, “Nat lupus inter oves”, “The wolf swims among the sheep” (1.304). The wit is deliberate, and it will recur. Then the loves of the gods begin. Daphne, running from Apollo, prays to lose the beauty that draws him, and bark closes over her breast (1.548 to 552). The god lays his hand on the trunk: “sentit adhuc trepidare novo sub cortice pectus”
“he perceives that the breast still throbs beneath the new bark” (1.554). He makes her his tree, and promises her to the doorposts of Augustus, postibus Augustis (1.562). The first love story of the poem ends at the door of the emperor’s house.
Io, changed to a heifer, tries to lift her arms in prayer and has none, tries to complain and lows, and is frightened by her own voice (1.635 to 638). She cannot tell her father who she is, until “Littera pro verbis, quam pes in pulvere duxit, / corporis indicium mutati triste peregit.”
“Instead of words, letters, which her foot traced in the dust, completed the sad discovery of the transformation of her body.” (1.649 to 650). Actaeon, who has seen Diana bathing, is given a stag’s head and runs. At the water he sees the horns and would cry out, and vox nulla secuta est (3.201), no voice follows. “Ingemuit: vox illa fuit, lacrimaeque per ora / non sua fluxerunt; mens tantum pristina mansit.” He groans, and that is his voice; his tears run down “a face not his own”, and “His former understanding alone remained.” (3.202 to 203). His own dogs bring him down while his companions call for Actaeon as if he were absent (3.244). The self is a body that can be taken while the mind stays, and the mind that stays cannot be heard.
Movement III
Echo has been punished for her talk: she can speak only the end of what others say. She loves Narcissus, and the scene is built on that limit. He calls “ecquis adest?”, and she answers “adest!” (3.380): “Is there any one here?” and “Here!” He calls her to come together with him, and she comes out of the wood to throw her arms around his neck. He runs: “I will die first, before thou shalt have the enjoyment of me.” She answers nothing but “sit tibi copia nostri”, “Have the enjoyment of me.” (3.391 to 392). Her reply is the tail of his line, and the line’s end is the event. Rejected, she wastes in caves until only her voice and her bones are left, and the bones turn to stone.
Narcissus, who has refused every lover, lies down by a pool and loves the face in it. The grammar folds back as he does: “dumque petit, petitur, pariterque accendit et ardet.”
“While he pursues he is pursued, and at the same moment he inflames and burns.” (3.426). The narrator tells him what the image is: “nil habet ista sui; tecum venitque manetque, / tecum discedet”, “it has nothing of its own. It comes and stays with thee; with thee it will depart” (3.435 to 436). Milton gave the turn to Eve at her own pool: “With thee it came and goes” (Paradise Lost 4.469). Then Narcissus knows. “Iste ego sum” (3.463), I am he, and “quod cupio mecum est: inopem me copia fecit.”
“What I desire is in my power; plenty has made me poor.” (3.466). He wastes by the water and is found as a flower. Desire seeks what it cannot hold, and here the thing it cannot hold is the self.
The poem pairs its changes and never comments on the pairs. Niobe, whose last child is killed as she pleads for it, sits among her dead and hardens: “intra quoque viscera saxum est.”
“Within her entrails, too, it is stone.” (6.309). “Flet tamen” (6.310): still she weeps, and on her mountain “even yet does the marble distil tears.” (6.312). Four books later, in Orpheus’ song, a sculptor’s ivory softens under his hands like wax in the sun, and “Corpus erat: saliunt temptatae pollice venae.” It was a body: “the veins throb, when touched with the thumb.” (10.289). Flesh becomes marble and keeps its tears; ivory becomes flesh. Between them stand Baucis and Philemon, who took in two gods when a thousand houses had shut their doors (8.628 to 629). They ask to die in the same hour, and turn to trees together in a chiasmus: “frondere Philemona Baucis, / Baucida conspexit senior frondere Philemon”
“Baucis beheld Philemon, and the aged Philemon saw Baucis” (8.714 to 715), each of them “shooting into leaf”.
Movement IV
The gods of the poem are powers, and they are also comic. As Jupiter goes down to the shore as a bull for Europa, the narrator stops to say: “Non bene conveniunt nec in una sede morantur / maiestas et amor”
“Majesty and love but ill accord, nor can they continue in the same abode.” (2.846 to 847). The father of the gods, who shakes the world with a nod, lows and walks in the soft grass (2.849 to 851). In the first book the gods meet in a quarter of heaven that the narrator would not fear to call “the palatial residence of Heaven”, Palatia caeli (1.176), and so sets the ruling hill of Rome in the sky. Whether that is homage or a joke the poem does not say.
Against these gods it sets its artists, and the artists pay. Arachne challenges Minerva at the loom and weaves the gods’ crimes. Non illud Pallas, non illud carpere Livor / possit opus (6.129 to 130): neither Pallas nor Envy could fault the work, and the goddess “tore the web embroidered with the criminal acts of the Gods of heaven” (6.130 to 131), and Arachne became a spider. Marsyas, who challenged Apollo, is flayed until nec quicquam nisi vulnus erat (6.388), he was nothing but wound. Tereus rapes Philomela and cuts out her tongue, and the poem watches it: “ipsa iacet terraeque tremens inmurmurat atrae”, it “faintly murmurs, quivering upon the black earth” (6.558). Shut away, she weaves the crime in purple on white and sends the web to her sister, who “fortunaeque suae carmen miserabile legit” (6.582), reads the pitiful song of her own fortune. The word is carmen, the poet’s word for this poem in its fourth line. Power takes the voice, and art is left as the witness; the art that tells the truth about heaven is punished for it.
Daedalus turns his mind to unknown arts, naturamque novat (8.189), and renews nature; he makes wings, and his son flies too near the sun. The father, “now no more a father”, calls the name three times in three lines, Icare, Icare, Icare (8.231 to 233), sees the feathers on the water, and curses his own arts. Orpheus goes down for Eurydice and sings before the throne of the dead: “As he said such things, and touched the strings to his words, the bloodless spirits wept.” (10.40 to 41). Near the edge of the light he looks back, and she slips away: “Iamque iterum moriens non est de coniuge quicquam / questa suo: quid enim nisi se quereretur amatam?”
“And now, dying a second time, she did not at all complain of her husband; for why should she complain of being beloved?” (10.60 to 61). He sings on in the hills until the women of Thrace tear him apart: “Caput, Hebre, lyramque / excipis”, “Thou, Hebrus, dost receive the head and the lyre” (11.50 to 51), and the lyre laments down the river, and the banks answer.
Movement V
From the twelfth book the poem comes to Troy and to Rome, and it handles them as digest rather than as change. Epic combat gives way to a debate. Ajax and Ulysses dispute the arms of Achilles, and the speaker wins: “quid facundia posset, / re patuit, fortisque viri tulit arma disertus.” What eloquence could do was plain in the event, “and the fluent man receives the arms of a brave one.” (13.382 to 383). The Aeneid is retold in 954 lines, from Troy’s fall to Aeneas’ deification (13.623 to 14.608), and Dido’s whole story takes four: she takes Aeneas into her house and her heart, cannot bear his going, and falls on the sword on a pyre built under a pretence of rites, deceptaque decipit omnes (14.81), deceived, deceiving all. The Sibyl, who asked Apollo for years and not for youth, foresees herself wasted to nothing: “vocem mihi fata relinquent.”
“My voice the Destinies will leave me.” (14.153).
In the last book Pythagoras speaks for four hundred lines (15.75 to 478) and gives the changes a physics. Souls pass from body to body; he remembers being Euphorbus at Troy. Omnia mutantur, nihil interit (15.165): all things change, nothing perishes. “ipsa quoque adsiduo labuntur tempora motu, / non secus ac flumen”
“Even time itself glides on with a constant progress, no otherwise than a river.” (15.179 to 180), wave pressing on wave. Tempus edax rerum, tuque, invidiosa vetustas (15.234): time, devourer of things, and you, envious age, destroy all things. In this physics nothing is punished and nothing is lost. In the fourteen books before it, change was mostly the caprice of the gods or their sentence. The poem sets the two side by side and does not choose between them.
Then the chain the poem has been building closes. Hercules on his pyre parte sui meliore viget (9.269), thrives in his better part; of Aeneas pars optima restitit (14.604), the best part remained; Caesar’s soul, carried off by Venus, becomes a star (15.845 to 850). The poet prays that the day Augustus goes up to heaven come late, later than his own age (15.868 to 870), and takes the last change for himself: “Iamque opus exegi, quod nec Iovis ira nec ignis / nec poterit ferrum nec edax abolere vetustas.”
“And now I have completed a work, which neither the anger of Jove, nor fire, nor steel, nor consuming time will be able to destroy!” (15.871 to 872). Pythagoras’ devouring age returns, and is refused. “parte tamen meliore mei super alta perennis / astra ferar, nomenque erit indelebile nostrum”
“Yet, in my better part, I shall be raised immortal above the lofty stars, and indelible shall be my name.” (15.875 to 876). “ore legar populi, perque omnia saecula fama, / siquid habent veri vatum praesagia, vivam.”
“I shall be read by the lips of nations, and (if the presages of Poets have aught of truth) throughout all ages shall I survive in fame.” (15.878 to 879). The one thing the form exempts from change is the form, and its last word is vivam, I shall live.
Act III · The Twelve
The test bites, because the method is accumulation. Within an episode the necessity is high: Narcissus (3.339 to 510) cannot lose a line without losing its mechanism, since Echo can return only final words; and the closing argument (15.165 to 258) needs everything before it as instances. What holds the axis lowest of the twelve is the method itself: a poem whose claim is totality makes its episodes exchangeable. The two battle set-pieces (5.1 to 235, 12.210 to 535) could go with little loss, the dogs named over Actaeon (3.206 to 225) are wit at length, Pythagoras’ dietary frame outruns his argument, and parts of the Italian sequence of Book XIV are thin. The scale is permitted by the method, not compelled by it.
Score: 8.2 / 10
Three disclosures can be stated, and they hold. The self is a body that can be taken while the mind stays: Actaeon weeps down a face “non sua”, and mens tantum pristina mansit (3.202 to 203); Lycaon’s wolf keeps eadem feritatis imago (1.239), so that the change shows what the person was. Power takes the voice, and art is left as the witness: Philomela’s web is a carmen (6.582), the poet’s word for this poem (1.4). Desire seeks what it cannot hold: inopem me copia fecit (3.466). Held below the summit by the irony through which these come. The poem rarely commits, and its view of Augustan power, the gods’ Palatia caeli (1.176), is a question set, not a truth stated.
Score: 9.1 / 10
Elevation is frequent, in terror and in grandeur: the Flood, “omnia pontus erant; deerant quoque litora ponto” (1.292); Niobe turning to stone and weeping still (6.301 to 312); Marsyas flayed until nec quicquam nisi vulnus erat (6.388); Eurydice dying a second time without complaint (10.60 to 61); the house of Sleep (11.592 to 615); Pythagoras’ river of time (15.178 to 185); the epilogue. What holds it down is a deliberate habit. Ovid deflates: in the Flood “The wolf swims among the sheep” (1.304), and Pyramus’ blood spurts like water from a split lead pipe (4.121 to 124). The wit turns transport into wonder more often than it lets it stand, so height is checked where frequency is not.
Score: 8.7 / 10
Myth built, not evoked. Transformation is the load-bearing structure of every episode, and the particular stays particular: Baucis props the table’s short leg with a sherd (8.661 to 662). The poem gave Narcissus, Echo, Pygmalion, Icarus, Pyramus and Thisbe their lasting Western shape, and it builds a myth across its length, a chain of apotheosis: Hercules parte sui meliore viget (9.269), of Aeneas pars optima restitit (14.604), Romulus (14.805 to 828), Caesar made a star (15.843 to 851), and the poet, parte tamen meliore mei (15.875). Held below the summit because the gods are themselves deflated as myth, the father of the gods lowing in a meadow (2.850 to 851), and some Italian legends of Book XIV are ornament.
Score: 9.6 / 10
The inheritance is plain: hexameter epic a generation after the Aeneid, Hesiod’s catalogue of origins, Lucretius’ cosmos for the frame, and a collection form already old. The turn is stated in one line (1.4), which joins deducere, the word for Callimachus’ fine-spun poem, to perpetuum, the continuous epic he scorned. Inside Virgil’s metre it swerves against Virgil: the Aeneid in 954 lines, Dido in four (14.78 to 81), and combat displaced by a debate that eloquence wins (13.382 to 383). The stake was real: a rival to Virgil on the Roman foundation, under Augustus, closing on a panegyric whose sincerity has been questioned ever since, by a poet relegated in the year of its completion. Held below the top because subject and collection form were inherited; the swerve is in scale, register and binding.
Score: 9.3 / 10
The form is continuous change: the narrative passes from episode to episode by links of place, kin, theme and teller, as bodies pass from shape to shape. Recast as separate tales, the poem keeps its stories and loses what it knows, that the world is one unbroken flux from chaos (1.5 to 9) to the poet’s present. Ted Hughes’ Tales from Ovid (1997) runs that experiment: a fine book of tales that no longer knows this. The end turns the form on itself. Pythagoras’ Tempus edax rerum (15.234) is answered by a work that nec edax abolere vetustas (15.872), devouring age cannot destroy: the one thing the form exempts from flux is the form. Held below the top: some transitions are mechanical, the chronology is loose, and from Book XII Troy and Rome are handled as digest rather than as change.
Score: 9.3 / 10
Evidence rather than promise: two thousand years in which each age found a different poem in it, from the late antique prose summaries and the allegory of the Ovide moralisé to the Renaissance handbook of painters and poets and the modern readings of rape and voice, of gender (Iphis, Caeneus, Hermaphroditus), of Augustan politics and of nature and diet. The formal depth is as evident, in pairings the poem never comments on: Echo, who can only return, beside Narcissus, who can only receive himself; Pygmalion’s ivory softening into flesh (10.283 to 289) against Niobe’s flesh hardening into stone (6.301 to 309); Actaeon’s vox nulla (3.201) against the Sibyl’s vocem mihi fata relinquent (14.153). Held a step down because Books XII and XIV have yielded less on return than the rest.
Score: 9.5 / 10
The field is the Latin and European tradition. The intrinsic force is a real reorganisation of narrative poetry: a continuous, many-voiced, episodic epic whose unity is a process and not a hero. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: the reach is the widest of any classical poem in Western art after Homer, and in the visual arts the widest of all, and it carries the score above the force. Dante places Ovid third in Limbo, “Ovidio è ’l terzo” (Inferno 4.90), and contends with him by name, “Taccia di Cadmo e d’Aretusa Ovidio” (Inferno 25.97); Golding’s Medea, “Ye Ayres and windes: ye Elves of Hilles, of Brookes, of Woods alone” (Golding VII.265), is the source of Prospero’s renunciation in The Tempest; A Midsummer Night’s Dream stages Pyramus and Thisbe; Milton builds Eve’s first waking on Narcissus’ pool.
Score: 9.6 / 10
Survival is demonstrated over two thousand years. The fifteen books survive complete; no part that carried meaning is lost, and the doubted lines are the small change of a long transmission. The poem has been read in schools and copied without break from antiquity to now, and its prophecy, ore legar populi (15.878), “So farre shall all folke reade this woork” in Golding’s English (Golding XV.995), has been fulfilled. The surface fixed to its moment is the Augustan close (15.745 to 870), with its dynastic and civil-war catalogue (15.822 to 831) and its prayer that Augustus’ ascent to heaven come late (15.868 to 870), which now needs a gloss. That close holds it a step below the summit.
Score: 9.6 / 10
Judged on the Latin, as command of the hexameter. It is the lightest of the great hexameter epics, eliding at under half Virgil’s rate by the same count, and one line in 11,927 recurs (4.795, 9.10), against a hundred and one in the Aeneid: the formula is given up for variation. The making does work. Echo’s scene makes the line’s end the event (3.380 to 392); Narcissus’ grammar folds on itself, “Se cupit imprudens et qui probat, ipse probatur” (3.425); the old couple are joined by chiasmus as they turn to trees (8.714 to 715); a single line catches flesh in the ivory (10.289). The costs: a wit that does not always know when to stop, nimium amator ingenii sui in Quintilian’s phrase (Institutio 10.1.88), the lead pipe (4.121 to 124), and mechanical transitions. Nothing is credited for sound.
Score: 9.5 / 10
One law, change of form that keeps a trait, told by one voice, and the two most distant elements obey it: Lycaon’s wolf, which servat vestigia formae (1.237), and Caesar’s soul made a star (15.845 to 850); so do the farce of Midas and the tragedy of Myrrha. The range is as wide as any in literature, and the fixed apotheoses, with the poet’s indelible name (15.876), stand against Omnia mutantur by design. What holds the axis is a second physics. In Books I to XIV change is mostly the gods’ caprice or punishment; in Book XV Pythagoras makes it natural law, in which nothing is punished and nothing perishes (15.165, 15.252 to 258). The poem sets the two side by side and does not reconcile them.
Score: 9.1 / 10
Transformation holds many orders in one structure: the cosmos and its elements (1.5 to 88, 15.237 to 258); the natural order, with sixteen traits surviving nunc quoque, even now, in rocks, birds, springs and a river’s gold; the gods; the family, from Procne and Itys to Baucis and Philemon; sex and gender; art and the artist; the city and history, from Thebes to Rome and Augustus; philosophy, in Pythagoras; and consciousness, in Narcissus and in Medea divided against herself, “Video meliora proboque, / deteriora sequor” (7.20 to 21), I see the better and approve it, I follow the worse. They are integrated, not listed: each enters through a body changing. Labour and the state as an institution are held more thinly; cities enter as genealogy and foundation, rarely as order.
Score: 9.5 / 10
Act IV · The Reckoning
9.3 / 10 · Final Average
Placement: Tier V · Epochal
Strongest Dimensions
The Archetypal Deep, Pressure on Tradition and The Imperishable at 9.6, with The Bottomless Well, The Made and The Encompassed at 9.5. Transformation built as the load-bearing structure of every episode, with a chain of apotheosis across the whole; the widest reach of any classical poem after Homer, and in the visual arts the widest of all; a poem that survives whole and has been read without break for two thousand years; and every order from the cosmos to consciousness entered through a body changing.
Limiting Dimension
The Inevitable at 8.2, held by an accumulative method whose episodes are exchangeable: the two battle set-pieces, the dogs named over Actaeon, Pythagoras’ dietary frame and parts of the Italian sequence of Book XIV could go with little loss. Within an episode the necessity is high. Next above it, The Sublime at 8.7: elevation is frequent and reaches both terror and grandeur, but a deliberate wit turns transport into wonder more often than it lets it stand.
The Necessity Cap clears at 8.2 against a threshold of 7.5. The Coherence Floor clears with room: The Living Form at 9.3, The Made at 9.5, The Inner Law at 9.1, each against 7.0. The Epochal Gate is met on all five: The Archetypal Deep at 9.6, Pressure on Tradition at 9.6, The Imperishable at 9.6, The Swerve at 9.3 and The Unconcealment at 9.1 clear the bar of 8.5, The Unconcealment by six tenths. The Universal Minimum is met (no axis falls below 8.2, against 7.5) and The Encompassed clears its own floor of 6.0 at 9.5. Every summit condition is met.
Basis · a reading of the Metamorphoses in Ovid’s Latin, the Perseus Digital Library text of Hugo Magnus (Gotha, 1892 to 1919): fifteen books, 11,927 printed lines and 77,643 words. The whole was measured by script, and about 2,100 lines, some 18 per cent, were read directly in the Latin, every passage this page rests on among them; the structure is judged on the whole poem, episode by episode. The fifty-nine lines Magnus prints only in his apparatus belong to the poem’s transmitted life; nothing here rests on them and none is quoted. Thirteen line numbers missing from the e-text are not charged to the poem. At 1.2 Magnus prints illas (the forms), where some modern editors print illa (the poet’s undertakings). Every score is judged on the Latin. Translations · Henry T. Riley’s literal prose (Bohn, 1851), Project Gutenberg e-texts #21765 and #26073, for sense and for every English quotation not marked as Golding’s, chosen because it keeps every episode in order and most clauses close to the Latin. It follows another text, so it was checked against the Latin wherever the page rests on it; where it loses a turn, as in the balance of meliora and deteriora (7.20 to 21) or the third Icare (8.233), the page gives the Latin. Its footnote markers are left out, and the words it supplies in braces are not quoted. Arthur Golding’s fourteeners (1567), Perseus, for the English poem, chosen because it is the English through which Ovid entered Shakespeare; it adds and moralises, and is quoted only where that history is the point, by its own book and line. The best modern versions, Charles Martin’s verse (2004) and the Loeb of Frank Justus Miller (1916) as revised by G. P. Goold (1977), were not in hand. English set without quotation marks after a Latin phrase is the page’s own literal gloss, and no translation’s English is charged to the poem. Dante is quoted from the Italian of Project Gutenberg e-text #1012 and Milton from e-text #20. The sound of the hexameter is beyond this reading, and nothing here is scored for or against it. Citations are by book and line of the Latin.