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Post by Pacifica on Mar 24, 2023 0:49:37 GMT
Vides illum Scythiae Sarmatiaeve regem insigni capitis decorum? Si vis illum aestimare totumque scire qualis sit, fasciam solve: multum mali sub illa latet.
—Seneca.
Would you say that totum is:
1) masculine, referring to the king (more or less literally: "and to know [him] all, what kind of man he is");
2) neuter, referring to the indirect question that follows ("and to know [the] whole [matter of] what kind of man he is");
3) neuter, used adverbially ("and to know entirely what kind of man he is")?
My first reading was 1), but I saw someone else take it as 3) and now I'm unsure.
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Post by Pacifica on Mar 24, 2023 0:51:32 GMT
Scire rarely takes a person as object. That's an argument against 1).
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Post by Bitmap on Mar 24, 2023 1:09:21 GMT
Scire rarely takes a person as object. That's an argument against 1. My initial, intuitive take would have been 3, some kind of neuter adverb. The problem with 1 is not only the thing you mentioned, but also that scire would have 2 objects there (a direct object of a person, which as you mentioned is rare, and an additional indirect question). I would have expected him to write totus and make it part of the indirect question if 1) had been the intended meaning. |
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Post by Pacifica on Mar 24, 2023 1:21:27 GMT
Scire rarely takes a person as object. That's an argument against 1. also that scire would have 2 objects there (a direct object of a person, which as you mentioned is rare, and an additional indirect question). That sometimes happens (maybe more often than scire taking a person as an object). Thanks! |
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Post by Bitmap on Mar 24, 2023 1:47:50 GMT
also that scire would have 2 objects there (a direct object of a person, which as you mentioned is rare, and an additional indirect question). That sometimes happens (maybe more often than scire taking a person as an object). Thanks! I'm not a very avid Seneca reader ... and what I have read of him was not prose or philosphy. If someone who knows his prose style better than I do thinks 1) is in line with his way of writing, that would be a valid argument for me ... but that would mean that he did such stuff regularly, and I'm not aware of that. As I said, that could be a result of my limited reading experience, but if I met that sentence head on with no information as to when it was written or who the author was, my attempt to make sense of totum would be to put it in the neuter adverb category. I can see the point of understanding it as 1) if you consider totum to be a Greek accusative ... but that would again boil down to taking the phrase adverbially. |
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Post by Pacifica on Mar 24, 2023 2:59:40 GMT
I'm now leaning toward 2) or 3), and the difference is negligible.
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Post by Bitmap on Mar 24, 2023 4:02:15 GMT
I'm now leaning toward 2) or 3), and the difference is negligible. 2) seemed to be the weirdest choice for me ... at least in the sense of "if you think 2 makes sense, why wouldn't you just pick the more obvious explanation in 3)?" As I said, 1) actually began making more sense to me when I started thinking of it as a Greek accusative, but that would at least mean it is some kind of adverbial phrase (which would bring it closer to 3, anyway). 2) just makes the least sense to me ... if only for the fact that if you think 2 is the case, you may as well think it is 3. |
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Post by Bitmap on Mar 24, 2023 4:03:35 GMT
2) just makes the least sense to me ... if only for the fact that if you think 2 is the case, you may as well think it is 3. I'm a bit tired. You know what I mean. |
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Post by LCF on Mar 27, 2023 18:29:48 GMT
3
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