ARGONAUTICON BOOK I.

Pencil annotations in margins and interlinear; catchword/signature at bottom right.

the deeds of men. Your offspring will reveal the overturned Idume Idumaea = Palestine
(for he is able), the brother blackening with dust Dominitian
he reveals scattering firebrands and raging in every tower.
Titus he, and the worship of the gods, and a hundred temples to the race 15

12\. Your offspring, Domitian, whose poetic ability was exalted with excessive praises by Quintilian, Institutio Oratoria X, 1, 91; Silius III, 618 ff.; Statius, Achilleid I, 14; they judged more truthfully, because they were able to speak freely, Suetonius, Domitian 2 and Tacitus, Histories IV, 86.

It is handed down in the Vatican manuscript as pandit (he reveals), which if written correctly, it must be established that at the time when Valerius composed this preface, Domitian had already begun a poem about the Jewish War, but according to the reasoning of the whole passage, the emendation of Gronovius pandet (will reveal) seems to be recommended; cf. a similar sentiment in Horace, Odes I, 6.

pandere i.e., to explain, used by poets since Lucretius; Idume is used by poets for Idumaea, i.e., Palestine, but in this place the city of Jerusalem is indicated as in Lucan III, 216, where Idume is named among Ninus, Damascus, Gaza, Tyre, and Sidon. What follows contains an explanation of the words overturned-Idume, so the asyndeton is legitimate and the particle que or et or ac should not be added by conjecture.

13. for he is able; concerning this parenthesis cf. II, 490; Vergil, Aeneid VI, 366.

blackening with dust as in Horace, Odes I, 6, 14, Meriones is called black with Trojan dust, II, 1, 21 leaders dirty with no unbecoming dust, Claudian, On the Third Consulate of Honorius 37 Honorius sprinkled with the welcome dust of war. We read Solyman ashes in Statius, Silvae V, 2, 138.

14. raging in every tower; cf. Juvenal, Satires VIII, 239: (Cicero) labors in every mountain.

15. Since it appears from verses 16 and 20 that the preface was written while Vespasian was alive, he is necessarily the one who was about to succeed his father soon, Titus, and Schenkel’s opinion, asserting on p. 276 that Domitian was meant, cannot be approved in any way. Titus, when Valerius wrote this, had not yet returned to Rome from Palestine: however, the pronoun ille (that one) is sometimes referred to a notion which is closer in terms of the arrangement of the words, if it seems more remote in thought, just as in Cicero, Tusculan Disputations II, 49: Pacuvius (says this) better than Sophocles, for in that one (Sophocles) Ulysses laments very tearfully at his wound: that one is the Greek poet and more remote in age and country; in Livy XXX, 30, 19: a certain peace is better and safer than a hoped-for victory: this (peace) is in your hand, that one (victory) is in the hand of the gods; cf.