# deum namque ire per omnes (Virgil)



## Casquilho

Salvete!
I need your kind help to understand and probably rewrite this phrase from Virgil (_Georgics_, Book 4), _deum namque ire per omnes_. Here is the context:

_His quidam signis atque haec exempla secuti
esse apibus partem divinae mentis et haustus   
aetherios dixere; *deum namque ire per omnes*
terrasque tractusque maris caelumque profundum.
Hinc pecudes, armenta, viros, genus omne ferarum,
quemque sibi tenues nascentem arcessere vitas;
scilicet huc reddi deinde ac resoluta referri 
omnia nec morti esse locum, sed viva volare
sideris in numerum atque alto succedere caelo._
(verses 219-227)

Mr. A. S. Kline translated _deum namque ire per omnes / terrasque tractusque maris caelumque profundum _as “since there is a god in everything, / earth and the expanse of sea and the sky’s depths”. I’m especially interested in this “there is a god in everything” because I’ll have it engraved on a medal, but I guess it wouldn’t be right simply to copy _deum ire per omnes _from Virgil. By the way, if this is the intended sense, shouldn’t it be _omnia_, the neuter accusative plural, instead of _omnes_? 
So that’s my problem, to isolate the idea and rewrite it to grammatically correct Latin, and, if possible, going not too far from the Virgilian original. Can you help me?


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## Quiviscumque

My Loeb edition annotates:
omnia _Peerlkamp_; omnis _codd_.

My amateur scholarship cannot go further; why this emendation? I don't know.


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## wandle

That emendation can only refer to *omnia* in the second last line. The meaning of the note is that the surviving ancient manuscripts of the Georgics have the word *omnis* in that place, but Peerlkamp has restored it to what Vergil presumably wrote. It needs to be neuter plural, so that *viva* can agree with it.

_*deum namque ire per omnes terrasque tractusque maris caelumque profundum*_ is indirect statement following *dixere*: 'for they say that the god (or 'a god') pervades all lands, all seas and the furthest heaven'. *Omnes* is correct here, because it refers to *terras* and *tractus*. The phrase '*ire per*' means 'go through'.

To convert this to a short, universal statement in direct speech, you could say: *deus it per omnia*, meaning 'god pervades all things'.


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## Quiviscumque

Sorry, but Loeb edition says 

221 omnia _Peerlkamp; _omnis _codd.
_
That's why my confession of ignorance was not rhetorical; _omnes_ makes sense and scans better, or at least I think so.


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## Scholiast

salvete amici!

For whatever my opinion may be worth, I must completely agree with wandle (and Quiviscumque) here. _omnes_ is clearly the right reading.

The apparent alternative _omn*i*s _may be what Virgil wrote, but note please that this is with a long *i*, _omnĩs_, masc. and fem. acc. plural, and distinct from the short _i _in _omnĭs_, singular.

Σ


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## fdb

Quiviscumque said:


> Sorry, but Loeb edition says
> 
> 221 omnia _Peerlkamp; _omnis _codd.
> _
> That's why my confession of ignorance was not rhetorical; _omnes_ makes sense and scans better, or at least I think so.



May I suggest that "221" is a printer's error of "226"? In vs 221 "omnia" is impossible (because of the metre, if for no other reason) and it cannot be imagined that Peerlkamp, or any other scholar, could have suggested it.


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## wandle

Hmm. It seems unlikely that a Loeb edition would get the line reference wrong.  I now see that Mynors' edition in the Oxford Classical Texts has *omnis*: *P. Vergili Maronis opera* ed. R. A. B. Mynors, Oxford 1969.  This has to be genitive singular, because at other points the text has *omnes* for the plural (m/f).

We seem to have difficulties at this point, however we read it. 

With *omnis*, the meaning has to be: 'they say that the god goes through the lands and expanses of the whole sea and through the deep heaven'. This preserves the reading of the manuscripts, but the expression 'the lands and expanses of the whole sea' is not natural. We would have to understand 'the whole sea' as meaning the Ocean, which for the ancients was the outer expanse of water encircling all the lands, a meaning *mare* normally does not have. Even if we accept that, the phrase *omnis terrasque tractusque maris* is still odd. The word order, where *omnis* agrees with *maris* (gen. sing.), shows that the meaning is 'the lands of the whole sea, together with the expanses of the whole sea'. We are faced with an awkward zeugma. We have to understand *terras maris* as the lands belonging to (because enclosed by) the whole sea and *tractus maris* as the expanses consisting of (i.e. constituted by) the whole sea. Either of those meanings might work on its own, but they do not sit well together.

With *omnia*, the meaning would be: 'they say that the god goes through everything, the lands, the expanses of the sea and the deep heaven'. This makes good sense; the problem is that *omnia* does not scan. In the last foot of the line, a dactyl is impossible. Thus in reading *omnia*, the letters *ia* would have to be slurred together, treating *i* as a semivowel, to make them into one syllable. I cannot think of any other example of this at the end of an hexameter line. Unless a parallel exists, I would not want to accept *omnia*.

If we read it as *omnes*, the meaning is 'the god goes through all the lands, through all the tracts of the sea and through the deep heaven'. This meaning also makes good sense and is definitely easier than with *omnis*. However, if the manuscripts are agreed in reading *omnis*, when the easier reading would be *omnes*, then we have to ask why. The rule of textual analysis which says *difficilior lectio potior* (the more difficult reading is preferable) means that it is not likely that a text would be changed towards a more difficult meaning. A copyist making a mistake might change a more difficult reading into an easier one, but would be much less likely to change an easier reading into a more difficult one. This consideration seems decisive if the manuscripts agree on the more difficult reading, while distinguishing *omnes* and *omnis* at other points. Thus we probably have to accept that *omnis* is correct.


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## wandle

There is plenty of quotation and discussion of the present passage online, with all three readings to be seen:

English translation by JW Mackail. Reading apparently *ire per omnes*, in common with a number of 19th-century editions.

Virgilio, Le Bucoliche. e Le Georgiche traduzione di Carlo Saggio, Rizzoli, 1954:


> _Ma un dio penetra in ogni cosa, nelle terre e negli spazi di mare e nel cielo profondo._ (IV, 221-2)
> *Deum namque ire per omnia, terrasque tractusque maris caelumque profundum.*


Servio e l’analogia by Maria-Luisa Delvigo. Reads *ire per omnis*. 
Discusses the philosophical aspects of this passage, without mentioning our textual point.

 Le psyché chez Virgile : conceptions et terminologie  by Angela Maria Negri. Bulletin de l'Association Guillaume Budé.  Reads *ire per omnis*. 
Another philosophical discussion not addressing our point.

The Georgics of Virgil: A Critical Survey  By L. P. Wilkinson

Wilkinson reads *omnis* and translates this as standing for *omnes*. 
He also cites the repetition of the line *terrasque tractusque maris coelumque profundum* from Eclogue 4.51, where no question of *omnis* arises:


> *aspice convexo nutantem pondere mundum,
> terrasque tractusque maris caelumque profundum*



There the line is self-contained and the meaning is simply 'the lands, and the expanses of the sea, and the deep heaven', each phrase expressing one kind of the parts making up the world, so that *maris* (a) does not go with *terras* and (b) does not have to mean 'the Ocean'.

Despite Wilkinson's translation, I still incline to Mynors' reading of *omnis* as genitive singular, for the reasons given earlier. The fact that in the fourth Georgic Vergil was recycling an earlier line, and had to do something to link it into its new context, seems to me to explain both the awkwardness of *omnis* and Vergil's willingness to put up with it for the sake of including a significant line which was appropriate to the broader philosophical or religious context of each passage and was presumably an intentional cross-reference.


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## fdb

I have checked on this now. In Georg. 4, 221 all the manuscripts do in fact have omnis, but some modern scholars have “emended” this either to omnia or omnes. Lewis/Short remark that omnia is “frequently” bisyllabic in poetry, citing, among others, this very verse, but it is surely not sound philological methodology to cite an emendation as grammatical evidence. The ending for the accusative plural of 3rd declension nouns/adjectives is regularly –is in old Latin, and frequently thus in classical Latin poetry (alongside the more frequent –es); there is thus no difficulty is retaining the reading of the codices (omnis) and taking it as acc. pl. modifying terras; in principle it could also be gen. sing. with maris, but this seems very forced. I do agree with our friend Wandle that the manuscript reading omnis is definitely the lectio difficilior.


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## wandle

fdb said:


> In Georg. 4, 221 all the manuscripts do in fact have omnis


Thanks for checking that.


> Lewis/Short remark that omnia is “frequently” bisyllabic in poetry, citing, among others, this very verse, but it is surely not sound philological methodology to cite an emendation as grammatical evidence.


L&S do cite a parallel case from Vergil (Aeneid 6, 33) where *omnia* is the last foot of the hexameter and is scanned as a disyllable. That is quite enough to remove the metrical argument against _*omnia*_ in my opinion. 


> The ending for the accusative plural of 3rd declension nouns/adjectives is regularly –is in old Latin, and frequently thus in classical Latin poetry (alongside the more frequent –es)


This is the decisive point. When I cited the appearance of *omnes* at other points in Mynors' text, I had overlooked that they are cases of the nominative. Thus, as *Scholiast* first pointed out, there is no difficulty in reading *omnis* as acc. plural.

Therefore the metrical argument against *omnia* and the morphological argument against *omnis* as acc. pl. both evaporate. There is also no grammatical argument against either. The only argument remaining in preference of *omnia* is that it might be thought better style not to have the word for 'all' preceding the linked phrase *terrasque tractusque maris*. This point seems debatable in itself, but even if it is granted it is still insufficient to overcome the fact that the manuscripts agree on *omnis*. The more you show that *omnia* is better, while still accepting that *omnis* is possible, the more this view fails on the principle of *difficilior lectio potior*.

So my elaborate argument for *omnis* as gen. sing. is torpedoed by the simple point that *omnis* is regularly acc. pl. I would have seen this if I had remembered those other well-known lines from the Georgics (2, 490):

*felix qui potuit rerum cognoscere causas
atque metus omnis et inexorabile fatum
subiecit pedibus strepitumque Acherontis avari*

all of which prompts the reflection:

*felix qui potuit verborum noscere formas
semipedisque omnis iuste numerare valorem.*


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## Scholiast

salvete omnes!

Interesting and fruitful though the discussion has been, we seem to have strayed (as we philologists so easily do) from Casquilho's original enquiry, which he ended:


> So that’s my problem, to isolate the idea and rewrite it to  grammatically correct Latin, and, if possible, going not too far from  the Virgilian original.


In that respect, for a motto, _deum ire per omnia_, "some god pervades everything" would still bear an evocative allusion to Virgil, though not (be it allowed that Virgil probably wrote _omnis /terras tractusque maris_ as I suggested in #5) an actual quotation.
Over to Casquilho, I suggest, to decide on the basis of the discussion and the options before him.

Σ


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