ABSTRACT
Fittingly, these remarks appeared in The Classical World, the monthly successor to The Classical Weekly, the magazine of the Classical Association of the Atlantic States to which Hahn contributed her very first known publication. In this four-page piece the young classicist had attempted to explain an alleged inconsistency in Vergil’s Aeneid. The ghost of Creusa, Aeneas’s wife, offers him a prophecy which he then appears to ignore. Hahn asks: ‘Why this waste of energy and augury? Is it in keeping with Aeneas’s pietas or with his equally customary thoughtfulness and deliberation thus to remain indifferent to a helpful prophecy of a dearly-loved wife? Have we a real inconsistency, which Vergil, given more time would have removed?’ (Hahn 1920:209). Consistent with her later linguistic work, in which she always valued the language of the original writer over any corrections by later editors and analysts, so here too Hahn found that the text was correct as it stood. Aeneas had not ignored Creusa’s prophecy but had followed her lead to Hesperia-to ‘“the Western land”, as it was to a Greek or a Roman…to Aeneas’ (p. 212). There was no need for Vergil to correct an error here; the problem is one only for the modern reader: ‘We with our hybrid English tongue cannot appreciate what certain words [such as Hesperia] must have meant to a Greek or a Roman’ (p. 212).
