vi. 26) quotes twenty-five hexameters of his, with the introductory

remark, which seems well deserved, ‘nemo ex tot disertissimis viris melius Ciceronis mortem deflevit quam Severus Cornelius.’

etiamsi sit. The use of the subj. would seem to indicate that Quintilian leaves the truth of the criticism an open question (Roby §1560). Osann is wrong in taking it as indicating Quintilian’s own opinion. See Crit. Notes.

versificator. This word occurs also in Justin. vi. 9, 4: versificatores meliores quam duces: Vopisc. Saturn. i. 7, 4: Terent. Maur. 1012: Bede 2354 P. If taken in a depreciatory sense it seems rather inconsistent with the high praise given him in what follows: but we gather from notices in the grammarians and from the extant fragments that Severus was ‘inclined to artificiality of expression and to the affectation of elegance, even where the thought is quite simple,’ as in the quotation in Charisius, p. 83 Huc ades Aonia crinem circumdata serta. For the antithesis _versificator ... poeta_ cp. Hor. Sat. i. 4, 39 neque enim concludere versum dixeris esse satis ... (ut) putes hunc esse poetam.

si tamen. _Tamen_ really goes with _vindicaret_, but the inversion _tamen si_ (Hild) is quite unnecessary; elsewhere in Quintilian _tamen_ is found attached to the subordinate and not to the principal sentence: xi. 3, 56 etiam si non utique vocis sunt vitia, quia tamen propter vocem accidunt, potissimum huic loco subiciantur: ii. 17, 24-25: cp. cum tamen xi. 3, 91. (In ix. 2, 55 si tamen = si modo, si quidem: in quo est et illa si tamen inter schemata numerari debet ... digressio: cp. ii. 15, 4.)

ut est dictum. Becher agrees with Halm in considering this to be a gloss on 86 etiam si (sit) melior, and it is omitted in Krüger’s 3rd ed. But it is obvious that (unless he is quoting from himself) Quintilian is here giving a criticism at secondhand (dictum sc. ab aliis), and conveying the opinion of contemporary critics: cp. §60 adeo ut videatur quibusdam, of Archilochus. No great difficulty need be occasioned by the position of the words, though they would have been at least as well placed in the main sentence. Kiderlin (in Hermes) proposes to read ‘etiamsi versificator quam poeta melior sit, tamen, ut est dictum, si ad exemplar,’ &c.

bellum Siculum: i.e. the war with Sext. Pompeius B.C. 38-36 (Siculae classica bella fugae Propert. ii. 1, 28). Scaliger suggested _bellum civile_, with which Severus’s poems seem to have dealt, either in whole or in part. The _primus liber_ is unknown. Bernhardy refers to the extract in Seneca, Suas. vii. (Burm. A. L. ii. 155) as justifying Quintilian’s criticism, and seems inclined to hazard the conjecture (based on a quotation from Valerius Probus in the Wiener Analecta Gramm. p. 216—Cornelius Severus rerum Romanarum l. 1) that the title of the whole work was Res Romanae, the Bellum Siculum being only a section.—(Can _bellum Siculum_ have crept into the text as a gloss on ‘primi libri,’ the more general title _bellum civile_ dropping out? The whole poem cannot have dealt with the _bellum Siculum_).

perscripsisset: common enough in the sense of ‘write a full account of’: here ‘from beginning to end’: cp. perlegere, pervenire.

secundum locum—among epic poets, after Vergil.

Serranum is the conjectural emendation generally adopted in place of the readings of the MSS. It rests on the passage in Juvenal