ABSTRACT
I have fought more than half of my professional life for a semicolon instead of a comma after line 4 in the prologue to the Aeneid. It needs some explanation to show that this is something more than an idée fixe.2 In the course of the last years four authoritative and ambitious editions have appeared, two of which are new recensions (the Editio Teubneriana by Conte, and the Spanish Alma Mater team project 2009–11 = Rivero et al.), another two editions are revisions (Goold 1999–2000 and Geymonat 2008). The old offensive comma is kept by all and seems almost to be above discussion, which in my view is much to the detriment of the clear underlying structure of the prologue. The argument against the traditional punctuation is in fact stronger than I realized when I first commented upon these matters in 1989. That is why I do not get tired of standing up again for the semicolon.
