Abstract

In his influential work Unpoetische Wörter, B. Axelson mentions sane as one of the words used freely in prose but generally avoided in verse.1 He briefly discusses its occurrences in poetry. A closer look at these occurrences offers some insight into the manner in which Roman poets employed words usually associated with prose writing or everyday speech, while raising some interesting questions about the accepted text of a passage in the Aeneid and the style of Ovid's Heroides 16–21