![]() It would have been instructive to sit at the elbow of these two poets, to see what they altered and what they rejected. ‘Saepe stilum vertas’, says Horace and he had excellent company in his friend Virgil, who wrote the Aeneid at the rate of only about 900 lines a year, and spent hours in licking his verses into shape. But ‘to have a pumpkin-head’ and ‘to be a pumpkin’ are prima facie very different, for the latter equates the man himself with the cucurbita, whereas it is only qua substitute for a head that the cucurbita can typify stupidity and when it is further observed that in the Petronian passage cucurbitae so interpreted accords ill with the context, it becomes clear that some other explanation must be sought. At first sight their interpretation of the Apuleian phrase is plausible, for it makes tolerable sense in the context and appears to be supported by such modern expressions as ‘pumpkin-head’ and Kürbiskopf and κεχλι κολοκνθνιον, all of which liken the head of a stupid man to a pumpkin or other gourd which, though bearing some resemblance to a human head, encloses not a brain but an insensate mass of pulp and seeds. Lexicographers and editors,1 comparing the one passage with the other, concur in the view that the cucurbita is the symbol of stupidity, and that a stupid man may be called a cucurbita, as in Petronius, or be said cucurbitae caput habere, as in Apuleius. cite only the two passages quoted above of these two, Lewis and Short cite only the former. For other metaphorical uses of the name, Forcellini and the Thes. 58, uentosa cucurbita, for which see Mayor's note ad loc. It is also the name of the cupping instrument called by Juvenal, xiv. 15: ‘nos cucurbitae caput non habemus ut pro te moriamur’.Ĭucurbita in its literal use is the name of many varieties of the numerous family of Cucurbitaceae, as one may learn, e.g. 12: ‘in Aquario (nascuntur) copones et cucurbitae’. We know next to nothing of what passed in the Hekale of Calhmachus between that heroine and Theseus on his way to deal with the bull of Marathon, and nothing of what passed in the Aetia between Molorchos and Herakles on his way to kill the lion of Nemea but both Hekale and Molorchos were treated as poor countryfolk who befriend a hero bound on a heroic mission, and, whatever may have been the divergences of handling, the agreement between the two poets in this far from obvious method of attacking an epic theme is noteworthy. Part 1, as has been said, is occupied by a conversation between a friendly rustic and Herakles, who, we must suppose, is seeking Augeias in order to clean out his cattle-byres. There is, too, at leaste point of contact with Callimachus. 24: the easy command and constant memory of Homer which is in T. 22: the keying down of the miraculous and heroic conspicuous in Id. ![]() There is the eye for landscape and the attention to setting conspicuous in Id. The poem exhibits the same conception of epic narrative as is seen in the authentic works of Theocritus. Phyleus has heard from an Achaean stranger some account of the death of the Nemean lion, suspects that its slayer may have been his companion, and questions him. In the third Herakles and Phyleus are discovered on their way to the neighbouring town. In the second ('EπιπÎλησισ) the hero, in attendance on Augeias and his son Phyleus, inspects the royal flocks and herds as they return at night to their folds and byres, and astonishes the spectators by the ease with which he repels the attack of a mighty bull. In the first (Hρακλσ πρῸσ γροîκον) Herakles is found in conversation with a rustic who describes to him the estates of Augeias and accompanies him in search of that king. The poem to which Callierges attached the title Hρακλσ ΛεοντοφῸνοσ from the narrative which occupies its last hundred lines falls into three sections, of which two have still, and all no doubt had originally, separate titles.
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