ABSTRACT
This text has (1) adopted the accusatives Scyllam and Charybdin from the paradosis (see the app. crit.) in the form Heinsius restored them (with double -que) governed by the following inter, and (2) accepted the conjecture of Nisbet1 which Mynors included in his text, i.e. utrimque instead of utramque.2 Against a return to utramque can be said: At Buthrotum Helenus had warned Aeneas urgently not to pass through the strait between Sicily and Italy because pontus . . . arvaque et urbes / litore diductas angusto interluit aestu: / dextrum Scylla latus, laeuum implacata Charybdis / obsidet (3. 418-21). And so Aeneas and his men are well aware of the dangers lurking on either side if they should try such a foolhardy thing as to pass through the narrow strait. Of course they would in such a case have to find a navigable passageway between either coast, that is in the middle. At best only one fairway would be possible for the helmsmen of the ships. Nisbet's utrimque frees us therefore by a stroke of conjectural genious and good luck from the unlikely conception of two fairways (utramque viam) and focuses instead on the perils of death threatening in equal measure from both sides.3 A text with utramque obscures, if not spoils, the intricate and subtle syntax of the clause: viam has got to be an apposition to cursus (poetic pl. for cursum), utramque would muddle this connection. The apposition viam with its qualifications (utrimque . . . leti discrimine parvo) precedes the word (cursus) to which it belongs. Such anticipated appositions are not infrequent in Latin.
