![]() ![]() Nouns are inflected for number and case pronouns and adjectives (including participles) are inflected for number, case, and gender and verbs are inflected for person, number, tense, aspect, voice, and mood. Moreover, and crucially, our evidence for Roman literature, especially pre-Virgilian literature, is too fragmentary to derive any secure linguistic argument. Clausula (rhetoric) Hyperbaton Alliteration v t e Latin is a heavily inflected language with largely free word order. Therefore the first question I posed – whether Virgil’s use of archaism has any thematic significance in terms of temporal relationship – seems more than possible, although to prove this point is impossible: one would need to know how Virgilian Latin was received by his early readers, but there is simply not enough evidence on this matter. Virgil’s use of archaism may suggest that, just as the language of Republican poetry before the development of the neoteric school must continue to be respected but in a suppressed manner, likewise the image of old Rome and her relationship with old Italy must not be erased entirely as the Romans move onto their next chapter of politics. ![]() 11.72-75) to wrap Pallas’ body and keeps the other for his personal use, symbolically depicting the suppression of his Oriental identity but also its continuation in the Roman background. This may have a thematic correspondence to Aeneas’ accommodation of the past into the present, which one can discern, for example, in the imagery of the colours gold and purple and its Oriental, ‘Eastern’ association: Aeneas uses one of the two robes of gold and purple made by Dido (cf. Here, one can argue that Virgil does accommodate some old morphological forms into his new Dichtersprache, and when he does so, he respects them by using them frequently. Nevertheless, it remains true that Virgil was amantissimus vetustatis, for otherwise it is unconceivable, for example, why the poet would wish to use the 3rd person perfect plural ending -ēre, which is archaic and has a ritualistic tone, far more frequently than the endings -ěrunt/-ērunt.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |