Abstract

Poetic incompetence is often blamed for infelicities or incongruities which appear in the poems collected in the Appendix Vergiliana, and in many cases such censure is justified. However, in the passage which is the subject of this note, Ciris 297–300, it is possible to reinterpret the incongruity which critics have remarked: when the pertinent evidence from antiquity is adduced, the lines are revealed as a display of scientific and etymological doctrina.