Visualizzare la malattia: sul testo di Lucrezio 3, 492-3

This article focuses on a particularly problematic passage from Lucretius’ De rerum natura (3, 492-3). Several editors retain the term distracta referring to uis morbi, but this choice is untenable, since the meaning of the verb does not fit with disease. Others believe that distracta refers to the soul and therefore change the nominative uis to the ablative ui; however, this solution requires either correcting animam to anima (which creates a metrical anomaly) or positing a lacuna between ll. 492 and 493. Drawing upon a conjecture made by Gilbert, I propose uis animist instead of uis morbi; this proposal, which requires a different punctuation from that generally accepted, is supported by a detailed linguistic and stylistic analysis of the passage.