Poems & Letters 51

I have heard that you say I incurred a barbarism in the homily in which I recently seem to have preached to the people of Lyons at the dedication of a basilica, openly chastising me for having erred in a public discourse. I confess that this could have happened, especially to me, for whom, if there were any studies of letters in my greener years, 'age carries all things away' (Virgil, Ecl. 9). Yet I had wished to hear this very thing from you set before your face, even though the faculty of learning is now diminished in me. But since I found that you said it in my absence, absent though I am, I have taken care to reply. They report, then, that you found fault because I said 'potitur' with the middle syllable long, not following Virgil in this word, who used the syllable itself shortened, saying 'vi potitur' (Aen. III).

But that is pardonable by the necessity of the poem, a thing which we often find Virgil in his work to have taken for granted, namely that he may discharge the law of meter, wherever there is need, content with a barbarism, and that in certain particular places he may invert the nature of syllables, in no way following the rule of the art: such as that line, 'Non erimus regno indecores' (Aen. VII), or 'Fervere Leucatem' (Aen. VIII), or that one, 'Namque ut supremam falsa inter gaudia noctem / Egerimus' (Aen. IX). No man of letters would deny that penultimate syllables naturally long ought to be so placed by the orator. Virgil, using the license of the poets, according to what we have said above, shortening the middle syllable, presumed it, that is 'potitur'.

Let us treat this word, poetic liberty being for a while set aside, rather by the law of the art. A deponent verb, in the present tense, singular number, first person 'potior'; second person, with the middle long, 'potiris'; it now remains that the third person, that is 'potitur', must likewise be long. Just as we say 'sortior, sortiris, sortitur', so in the perfect past tense, of the first, second, and third persons, 'potitus sum, es, est'; so in the imperative mood, present tense, in the second person 'potire', like 'sortire'. Likewise in the optative mood, present tense and imperfect past, under all three persons, the syllable equally long: 'utinam potirer, potireris, potiretur'. But if, of the third person, you set 'potitur' short—

—you will be forced to do the same for the second person also, so that you say 'potiris' short: which the integrity of Latinity excludes from all example and usage. Behold the word for which I had been reproved by you, from which I dare to borrow an argument. Now, however, rendering an honorable greeting, with earnest prayers, I ask that—since I by the right of friendship have expressed in the style of a rather free page what seemed true to me—you too in turn, setting aside, as was said above, the example of Virgilian authority (whom for this very reason we ought not to follow in the usurpation of barbarisms, although the same Virgil placed 'potitus' or 'politi' long, as is that verse 'auroque politi' [and polished with gold]), may hand over to me by an explanatory rescript the reasoning I ought to follow.

Or if indeed you choose to instruct the inquirer by the summary of some testimony, I hope that you may lay open, more diligently sought out and found, from the ancient orators whom you deservedly hand down to your pupils; for without the argument of the art—nor of rhetoric either—will the father and the common son be found, whose talents I would prefer that at the present time you should imbue as their first, rather than their only, teacher, content with this single fault alone. Yet let them, from that rich fount of doctrine from which you flow forth, even now amid their beginnings drink no less than mere letters, since it becomes one to draw a friend on by studies rather than to detract from him, and to speak out as an orator rather than to speak against.