Laudator Temporis Acti

Propertius 3.5.13-18 (tr. G.P. Goold):

You will take no wealth to the waters of Acheron:
fool, you will be naked when you travel on the ferry of the world below.
Victor and vanquished meet as equals among the dead:
beside consul Marius sits captive Jugurtha in the boat.
Croesus of Lydia differs not from Irus of Dulichium:
that death is best which comes when life has been first enjoyed.

haud ullas portabis opes Acherontis ad undas:
    nudus in inferna, stulte, vehere rate.
victor cum victo pariter miscetur in umbris:        15
    consule cum Mario, capte Iugurtha, sedes.
Lydus Dulichio non distat Croesus ab Iro:
    optima mors, carpta quae venit ante die.

14 <in> Barber inferna . . . rate ς: [ad] inferna[s] . . . rate[s] Ω
15 victo Willis: victis Ω | miscetur <in> Housman: miscebitur Ω
18 carpta Baehrens: parca Ω | ante Helm: acta Ω

W.R. Smyth, Thesaurus Criticus ad Sexti Propertii Textum (Leiden: E.J. Brill, 1970), p. 93: G.P. Goold, "Noctes Propertianae," Harvard Studies in Classical Philology 71 (1967) 59-106 (at 79-81):

Verse 14 needs only the briefest word: <IN> INferna, stulte,... rate (Palmer, and independently Barber) led by the easily discernible stages of inferna ... rate and infernas ... rate and infernas ... rates to a point which clamoured for the insertion of the preposition ad. For the elegiac Muse there exists only one infernal boat, and the dead are uecti, "given passage," not to it, nor from it, but in it.

The first couplet addresses an imaginary reader "You will not take your wealth with you to the underworld,"; the second contains the platitude "Victor and vanquished sit side by side in the underworld." More precisely the Latin of the third verse says, according to the manuscripts, "Victor will be equally mingled with the vanquished shades," with three flaws. (1) The future tense destroys the logic of the couplet. The theme is "Victor and vanquished are as one in death," not will be: the futures of 13f are apt and prophetic, since the poet apostrophizes someone alive; but in 15f the statement is universal and, as the pentameter shows, requires the timeless aspect of the present. (2) "Vanquished shades" is a gross inelegancy for "the shades of the vanquished"; and after his uictrix cum uictis, a reductio ad absurdum if ever there was one, Postgate must be summarily divested of the laurels with which we have just crowned him. The first verse shows how unlikely the poet was to speak of opulentae umbrae: his very theme is that there exists no discrimination between umbrae. (3) "The victor will be equally mingled ..." is nonsense: equally with what? On the construction of pariter in Propertius' sentence, Ovid, Her. 8.57 will throw valuable light: ora mihi pariter cum mente tumescunt "My face and mind are equally swollen with anger": pariter cum serves as an alternative to et ... pariter (cf. Ovid, Ars 2.728 pariter femina uirque "woman and man alike"). Thus we must interpret "Victor and vanquished shades alike will be mingled": but mingled how or where or when or why? The sentence now lacks a formal predicate.

Housman (JP 16 [1888] 9) removed these three distinct flaws by the neat conjecture miscetur in "Victor and vanquished alike are mingled among the dead" (i.e., are numbered among the dead). Clearly, in was swallowed up by um-bris, and, under the influence of the futures in the preceding lines, some scribe replaced miscetur with miscebitur to fill up the verse.

Now it happened not long ago that I challenged my classmate James Willis, quo non praestantior alter, to emend this crux, and without remembrance of Housman's conjecture or the slightest hint from me he duly came up with miscetur in. But to my consternation he came up with more: he pointed out that the inconcinnity of number in uictor cum uictis, harsh in itself, cannot be imputed to Propertius when augmented by the homoeoptoton ... -is... -is in unrelated words at caesura and verse-end. Willis' emendation is:

uictor cum uicto pariter miscetur in umbris.

Someone has altered cum uicto . .. miscebitur umbris to cum uictis... miscebitur umbris.

Verse 18, "that death is best which comes driven by thrifty day," has by virtue of its manifest unintelligibility impelled most critics to pronounce it corrupt. Though common sense will not itself restore the original words for us, it will nevertheless permit us to reject out of hand with the utmost assurance Lachmann's Parcae: "that death is the best which comes driven by the day of the Fate." Pass over the conundrums of death being driven, of death's being driven by a day, of a day of Fate, of the Fates being reduced from three to one: what would this conjecture mean? It would mean that, if one is fated to be cut off in childhood, to be butchered in war, to be stricken down by disease, or to perish in some horrible tragedy, then that death is best. There lurks, alas, a Beckmesser in even the greatest of Meistersinger, and it chose this moment to appear in Lachmann.

Let us turn quickly to Baehrens' felicitous and, of course, certain restoration carpta quae uenit . . . die "which does not come until life has been enjoyed" (cf. Hor. Carm. 1.11.8): the route from carp(t)a to parca is a short one, and retracing it brings us back to sanity. We are, however, not yet through. With carpta, acta cannot stand: senseless before, it is impossible now. Baehrens himself discarded it in favour of apta (DV), a feeble attempt to improve on acta, as Luck's contrived translation betrays: "Der Tod ist der beste, der im rechten Augenblick, wenn man das Leben genossen hat, kommt," i.e., optima mors est, quae optima ... uenit. What Propertius wrote was carpta quae uenit ante die (Helm, BPW 54 [1934] 170) "'which does not come until life has first been enjoyed." Compare 1.1.2 contactum nullis ante cupidinibus; Ovid, Fast. 1.234, Her. 3.87. After the corruption of carpta, ante lacked a connection with the grammar of the sentence, and was doomed.

See also D.R. Shackleton Bailey, Propertiana (Cambridge: At the University Press, 1956), pp. 145-146.