Abstract

The phraseire ad scopulumhas long been the victim of a conspiracy of silence. Thecaput coniurationis, one might say, is an editorial prejudice against the transmitted text born of a rather misguided enthusiasm for Vossius' conjecturecapulum. That conjecture has been a reliable fixture in the modern Lucretian vulgate since Havercamp first printed it in his text of thede rerum natura. Before the publication of Havercamp's edition, however, scholars had not baulked at the transmitted text, rightly glossing it as a nautical metaphor for ‘ruin, destruction’: in the words of Lambinus, ‘ad interitum: translatum a navi, quae infligitur scopulo’. But after the appearance of Havercamp's edition editors and commentators strangely refused to give due consideration to the reading of the manuscripts, ignoring it for no better reason than a presumption of error. I propose, therefore, in the following discussion to expose the fallacious reasoning that undergirds such a presumption and to vindicateire ad scopulum.