ABSTRACT
Neither Borzsak nor Mankin have adopted any conjecture in their text of ‘Beatus ille’. In Beatus ille another ordering is evidently at work: in his enthusiasm the speaker has obviously no wish to group activities according to any disposition. One would first think that the person speaking is labouring under his own debt. He gives us the impression that he is a cliens who has to call upon his superiors to be able to carry on and that he feels his situation humiliating. Watson adopts Scrinerius’s conjecture Roma quas in his text, writing: “Framed by an idyllic description of rural life, and an account of the domestic felicity enjoyed by the countryman, the question ‘who is there that does not forget the cares of love amid such things as these?’ is unexpected and inconsequential in the mouth of a speaker whom no one could have suspected until now was suffering the pangs of love.”.
