HoRAT. Serm. 1. 10 (1-S). 37 



(c) 'Loiige subtilior'is irrep;ular. "Cicero and the older 

 writers did not use ' longe " to strengthen the comparative, 

 though it appears in poets of a later age and in the more 

 recent historians.""* Wolflinn'" says that Horace kept 

 strictly to the old rule of 'multo' with the comparative, 

 using 'longe' only in one anomalous case. He would 

 therefore not have written 'longe' here instead of its met- 

 rical equivalent 'niulto,' and its use is one proof of the 

 spurious nature of these eight lines. 



(d) 'Hie* and 'illo,' ending consecutive lines and refer- 

 ring to ditferent persons, are strange and confusing as to 

 meaning. Suetonius rejected a certain prose epistle which 

 purported to have been written by Horace, ' epistula etiam 

 obscura, quo vitio minime tenebatur'.'" He would scarcely 

 have found the transparency of genuineness in verses 8-4. 

 To avoid the difficulties in 'lenius' and 'ille . . . illo' Schiitz 

 would strike out the two half- lines and read 'emendare 

 parat versus subtilior illo." 



Vs. 5. If the genuineness of verse 4 may be questioned 

 on the ground of obscurity, still more objectionable is 

 verse 5. It seems impossible to explain this and the fol- 

 lowing lines in their best attested form. For example, 

 who is the person compared with CatoV 



(a) Because Horace says, Epp. II. 1, 70, that he studied 

 the poems of Livius Andronicus in his boyhood under the 

 'plagosus Orbilius,' many editors have made 'qui puer . . . 

 exoratus' refer to the poet himself. It may be doubted 

 whether Horace would have thus spoken of himself, but a 

 greater difficulty awaits us inverse 8, 'eijuitum doctissimus.' 

 These words most naturally refer to the same person as 

 'qui . . . exoratus,' and Horace was not an 'eques.' 



(h) Reisig, who reads 'puerum . . . exhortatus,' makes 

 'puerum' refer to Horace, 'qui' to Orbilius. But to this 

 Schiitz objects that 'puerum' would be too indefinite with- 

 out ' istum' or 'ilium.' | 



'*Hand, Tursellinus, III. !>. 551. 

 ^^ Compitration, p. 40. 

 ■^' Horatii Foetae Vita. 



