Notes on Fam., XXIV, 11, to Vergil
[101]. An allusion by Petrarch to the statement which he himself makes in the second letter to Cicero, Fam., XXIV, 4. ([Consult n. [17] of that letter.)
[102]. St. Jerome, Chron., (Migne, Vol. XXVII, coll. 453, 454): “M. Annaeus Lucan of Cordova, a poet, having been detected as participating in the conspiracy of Piso, held out his arm to the physician that his veins might be opened.” This statement was taken from Suetonius (Rel., p. 299, ll. 10-12 [Teubner]), who gives the further detail that Lucan committed suicide at the close of a splendid banquet—“epulatusque largiter” (op. cit., p. 300, ll. 3, 4; Reifferscheid, Rel., p. 52, ll. 1, 2). The statement of the commentator Vacca on the subject—“venas sibi praecidit” (Reiff., op. cit., p. 78, l. 6)—cannot be considered the source of Petrarch’s “arterias medico dedit ille cruento” (Vol. III, p. 291, l. 2), because the word “medicus” does not appear therein, as it does in the passage cited from St. Jerome (Suetonius).
[103]. Again St. Jerome is the authority. Chron., (Migne, Vol. XXVII, coll. 425, 426): “Titus Lucretius the poet is born, who in later years went mad because of a love philter. And although in the intervals of lucidity he composed several books (which Cicero afterward corrected), he committed suicide in the forty-fourth year of his age.”
[104]. Aeneid, vi, 898, and Conington’s translation, p. 215:
Conversing still, the sire attends
The travellers on their road,
And through the ivory portal sends
From forth the unseen abode.