(a) The protocol, third rep
Header → first sentence slowly → verbs → park unknowns → point at the clause (L15/L30). Plus today's poetry moves: re-order before translating; let meter disambiguate; mythology is data. Time target: 7 minutes per passage including questions.
(b) Sight Passage A — Aen. 4.362–375 (she answers Italiam non sponte sequor):
Talia dicentem iamdudum aversa tuetur huc illuc volvens oculos totumque pererrat luminibus tacitis et sic accensa profatur: 'nec tibi diva parens generis nec Dardanus auctor, perfide, sed duris genuit te cautibus horrens Caucasus Hyrcanaeque admorunt ubera tigres. nam quid dissimulo aut quae me ad maiora reservo? num fletu ingemuit nostro? num lumina flexit? num lacrimas victus dedit aut miseratus amantem est? quae quibus anteferam? iam iam nec maxima Iuno nec Saturnius haec oculis pater aspicit aequis. nusquam tuta fides. eiectum litore, egentem excepi et regni demens in parte locavi. amissam classem, socios a morte reduxi
A1. Talia dicentem … aversa tuetur — re-order: who watches whom, in what posture? What do iamdudum and aversa contribute? A2. luminibus tacitis — what are "silent lights," and why is the transferred adjective the right horror here? A3. The genealogy-curse (365–367): what does she deny him, and what does she substitute? Name the rhetorical move. A4. The num-battery (368–370): what does num expect as an answer, and what three failures does she catalogue? Whose behavior is she actually quoting? (Check L36's frame — immota tenebat lumina.) A5. nusquam tuta fides — three words, no verb. Translate and connect to her L35 vocabulary (data dextera, perfide). A6. eiectum litore, egentem excepi … demens in parte locavi — what is she reciting, and what does demens (her own word for herself!) concede? (Cf. the narrator's demens for her at 4.78, L33 — who used it first?) A7. Summary (1.C): one sentence.
(c) Sight Passage B — Aen. 6.298–307 (Charon at the crossing):
portitor has horrendas aquas et flumina servat terribili squalore Charon, cui plurima mento canities inculta iacet, stant lumina flamma, sordidus ex umeris nodo dependet amictus. ipse ratem conto subigit velisque ministrat et ferruginea subvectat corpora cumba, iam senior, sed cruda deo viridisque senectus. huc omnis turba ad ripas effusa ruebat, matres atque viri defunctaque corpora vita magnanimum heroum, pueri innuptaeque puellae,
B1. Build Charon's portrait from the four descriptors (squalor, beard, eyes, cloak). Which detail is the uncanniest, and why? (stant lumina flamma — what verb would you expect of eyes?) B2. cui plurima mento canities inculta iacet — untangle the dative-of-possession knot and translate. B3. iam senior, sed cruda deo viridisque senectus — resolve the paradox: how can old age be "raw and green"? What does deo explain? B4. defunctaque corpora vita — parse defuncta … vita. (The verb defungor takes what case? What is the participle's relationship to corpora?) B5. pueri innuptaeque puellae — you have read this exact phrase before in your REQUIRED lines. Where, and what does the repetition do to both scenes? (Hint: L32, the rope.) B6. Squalor on a god: compare Charon's terribili squalore … sordidus amictus with the ghost of Pliny 7.27 (macie et squalore confectus, L16). Coincidence of genre, or shared visual code? What does each squalid figure WANT? B7. Summary (1.C): one sentence.
(d) Answer key
A1. SHE watches HIM as he says these things (Talia dicentem — accusative object of tuetur): "long since turned away (aversa), she eyes him as he speaks." iamdudum — she's been glaring throughout his whole speech (retroactive stage-direction for all of L36); aversa — body turned away, eyes dragged back: contempt and attachment in one posture. The deponent tuetur (watches) is predatory-flavored — the stare of assessment. A2. Her eyes (lumina — the standard metonymy). "Silent lights" = eyes that say nothing while roving over all of him (totum pererrat) — surveillance without disclosure. The transfer (silence belongs to mouths) makes the gaze itself a withheld speech: the storm is being inventoried before it's released (accensa — ignited — follows immediately). A3. She denies him divine descent (nec diva parens — Venus revoked) and Trojan ancestry (nec Dardanus auctor) and substitutes a geology and zoology: the bristling Caucasus bore him from hard crags; Hyrcanian tigresses gave him their udders (admorunt ubera — syncopated admoverunt). The move: genealogical erasure — un-birthing the opponent; if his conduct is inhuman, his origins must be too. (Park Hyrcanae if unknown: "some wild place" suffices — the tigers carry the meaning.) A4. Num expects NO. Did he groan at my weeping? Did he turn his eyes? Did he, overcome, give tears or pity his lover? Three sensory failures: no sound, no glance, no tears. She is quoting — accurately — the narrator's frame from L36: Iovis monitis immota tenebat lumina. What the narrator certified as heroic suppression, she reads as proof of inhumanity. Same data, two verdicts: the scene's tragedy, restated as a grammar drill. (And note her lumina flexit against his immota … lumina — she even uses the same noun.) A5. "Nowhere is faith safe" / "no trust is anywhere secure" — verbless universal (supply est). It generalizes her case into cosmology: the fides his data dextera pledged (L35) has been falsified, therefore the category collapses. Three words doing the work of a philosophy — and the bleakest possible echo of perfide. A6. Her own benefaction-ledger: I took him in — shipwrecked on my shore (eiectum litore), destitute (egentem) — and MADLY (demens) gave him a share of my kingdom; I brought back his lost fleet, his comrades from death. It's the L35 merit-claim (si bene quid de te merui) re-itemized — but now demens is her own self-verdict: she counter-signs the narrator's diagnosis from 4.78. The word has migrated from narrator to speaker: she has caught up with the poem's opinion of her, which is how Vergil marks the beginning of her end. A7. Model: "Turned away but watching him throughout, Dido erupts: she un-births him to crags and tigresses, catalogues his unmoved eyes and absent tears as proof no god or Trojan fathered him, declares trust dead everywhere, and recites — against herself — the mad generosity with which she rescued and enthroned a castaway." B1. Filth that terrifies (terribili squalore); an uncut mass of white beard lying on his chin (plurima canities inculta); eyes that STAND in flame (stant lumina flamma); a dirty cloak hanging by a knot from his shoulders. Uncanniest: the eyes — you expect eyes to flash, dart, glance (motion-verbs; cf. micat, 1.90); stant — they STAND, fixed pillars of flame: stillness where life-signs should be. The dead's ferryman has unblinking furnace-eyes; the verb does the shudder. B2. "On whose chin (cui … mento — dative of possession + local ablative flavor) lies very-much unkempt white hair": plurima canities inculta — quantity (plurima), substance (canities = white hair, abstract-for-concrete), grooming-status (inculta). Re-knit: "a great mass of unkempt white beard lies on his chin." B3. senior — old in appearance; but his old age is cruda (raw, unripened — the word for unprocessed strength) viridisque (green, sap-filled) BECAUSE he is a god (deo — dative of possession: "to a god, old age is raw and green"). Divine aging is cosmetic: the years accumulate without decay. The paradox dissolves into theology — and the line is a famous quotable for "How does Vergil characterize immortality?" B4. Defungor takes the ABLATIVE: defuncta vita = "having finished WITH life" — deponent participle agreeing with corpora: "bodies done with life." (Not "dead bodies" simply: the idiom frames life as a task discharged — bureaucratic, almost Plinian.) The phrase is also bittersweetly literal: what arrives at the bank IS bodies-that-completed-life — the souls still look like what they were. B5. 2.238–239: pueri circum innuptaeque puellae / sacra canunt — the boys and unwed girls singing around the horse's rope (L32). Here the same boys-and-unwed-girls crowd the bank of the dead. The repetition is Vergil's grimmest rhyme: the demographic that celebrated the fatalis machina is the demographic the machine delivered here. Formula as fate: the phrase walked from the festival to the ferry. (THIS is what "track the echo" means in essays — and you found it at sight.) B6. Shared visual code: squalor = suspension from the human order — the unburied ghost (Pliny) and the under-spruced psychopomp (Vergil) both wear neglect as their condition. Difference in want: Pliny's ghost wants completion (burial, the rites owed — and gets them: rite conditis manibus); Charon wants compliance (fares, order at the bank — he is the rite). One squalid figure is a creditor of ritual, the other its toll-collector. The comparison (genre-code + divergent function) is exactly the cross-author move your Q4/Q5 project essays reward. B7. Model: "Charon — filthy, white-bearded, flame-eyed, his dirty cloak knotted at the shoulder — poles and sails his rust-colored skiff, an old man with a god's green old age, while the whole crowd of the newly dead, mothers and men, great heroes, boys and unwed girls, streams rushing to his bank."
⭐ Exam strategy: Passage A was your required text's NEXT FOURTEEN LINES, and you read them cold — notice how much arrived pre-loaded (perfide, dissimulo, lumina, fides — all L35–36 vocabulary recycled by Vergil himself). On the real exam, sight passages adjacent to syllabus scenes are common precisely because the poet repeats his own lexicon. Trust the carryover: your required 448 lines have quietly taught you several thousand more.