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Post by Bitmap on Apr 17, 2023 11:37:18 GMT
We came across the following passage from the Aeneid in an unrelated chat this morning:
7,187-191
ipse Quirinali lituo parvaque sedebat
succinctus trabea laevaque ancile gerebat
Picus, equum domitor, quem capta cupidine coniunx
aurea percussum virga versumque venenis
fecit avem Circe sparsitque coloribus alas.
I took aurea to be nominative because of the metre and because it has an obvious word, Circe, that it agrees with.
However, I noticed that in translations, it is usually taken to be ablative agreeing with virga.
The translation by A.S. Kline is
"There Picus, the Horse-Tamer, sat, holding the lituus, the augur’s
Quirinal staff, and clothed in the trabea, the purple-striped toga,
and carrying the ancile, the sacred shield, in his left hand,
he, whom his lover, Circe, captivated by desire, struck
with her golden rod: changed him with magic drugs
to a woodpecker, and speckled his wings with colour."
There is a parallel line in the Aeneid that seems to have sparked similar discussions:
1,695-699
Iamque ibat dicto parens et dona Cupido
regia portabat Tyriis, duce laetus Achate.
Cum venit, aulaeis iam se regina superbis
aurea composuit sponda mediamque locavit.
The translation by A.S. Kline is
"Now, obedient to her orders, delighting in Achetes as guide,
Cupid goes off carrying royal gifts for the Tyrians.
When he arrives the queen has already settled herself
in the centre, on her golden couch under royal canopies."
The German translation by Voss, whom I highly appreciate, takes aurea in both passages as an ablative as well.
What would be your verdict? Nominative or ablative?
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Post by Bitmap on Apr 17, 2023 12:13:56 GMT
The obvious reasoning for the nominative is that you would expect that word to be dactylic due to the metre, and that any clueless reader would take it that way at first. It makes sense in grammatical and semantic terms as it would refer to a woman (Dido in the first example and Circe in the second), so it's hard to see why that's not the obvious choice.
The obvious reasoning for the ablative is that there is a feminine ablative two words later that would look a bit naked as a stand-alone. However, that would require you to read the word aurea as a synizesis in order to make it a spondee.
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Post by Bitmap on Apr 20, 2023 4:07:20 GMT
Does anyone think that these words should be taken as ablatives?
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Post by LonginusNaso on Apr 20, 2023 9:02:53 GMT
Much as I like the idea of aurea being attributed to a beautiful woman, I have absolutely to vote 'ablative'. Great poets have always adored metrical tricks like 'synizesis' (on LD we brushed at least once on Virgil's abietibus, if I recall, which would demand that first 'i' be a normally inadmissible medial semi-vowel), and it might even parallel the Greek habit (the oblique forms, e.g., χρυσέωι are read with synizesis in †Homer). †I'm pretty sure, but too lazy to check.  |
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Post by Pacifica on Apr 20, 2023 10:27:02 GMT
I'll repeat here pretty much what I said elsewhere.
I first read the aurea in aurea percussum virga as nominative just because that was what seemed to scan. But when it was pointed out that aurea could be shortened to two syllables (a rare-ish but by no means unheard-of phenomenon), I started leaning toward that interpretation because it reads much more naturally that way meaning-wise. Had it not been for the meter, it would never even have occurred to me that aurea could be anything else than an ablative with virga.
In the sponda passage, too, I think aurea is more likely ablative.
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Post by Bitmap on Apr 21, 2023 11:45:32 GMT
Great poets have always adored metrical tricks like 'synizesis' (on LD we brushed at least once on Virgil's abietibus, if I recall, which would demand that first 'i' be a normally inadmissible medial semi-vowel), and it might even parallel the Greek habit (the oblique forms, e.g., χρυσέωι are read with synizesis in †Homer). But when it was pointed out that aurea could be shortened to two syllables (a rare-ish but by no means unheard-of phenomenon), I started leaning toward that interpretation because it reads much more naturally that way meaning-wise. Had it not been for the meter, it would never even have occurred to me that aurea could be anything else than an ablative with virga. I don't really have the impression that they adored such metrical tricks. I know that they exist, but they are much rarer than I would have thought initially when I learnt about metre. It seems more like something they resort to when they feel like they have no real other choice. Vergil has abietibus once in the Aeneid and parietibus twice (and once in the Georgica), but he was the only Augustean poet to do so with *ietibus-words. I wouldn't even call that a synizesis, actually. With i and u, it is not like two vowels get pronounced together, but that /i/ has a corresponding semivowel in /j/ and /u/ has a corresponding semivowel in /w/ ... Which is why you can just pronounce it [abjetibus] and [parjetibus], and which is why Ovid does things like exsolvisse = [exsoluisse] (but also very rarely). A real synizesis is more something like merging e and i into one syllable, like in rei, fidei, deinde or e and e like in deest. These are rather common because e+e is not very hard to pull together, and e+i was a natural part of Latin, at least in Cicero's times (the ending -īs was still -eis in Cicero's times afaik). I find it hard to imagine how a synizesis between e+a or e+o is supposed to be pronounced, though. That said, I like the fact that you pointed out the Homeric echo. Vergil has aureo twice in the Aeneid, and it is a synizesis both times. {Spoiler: Examples}
VERG. Aen. 8, 370-373
At Venus haud animo nequiquam exterrita mater
Laurentumque minis et duro mota tumultu
Vulcanum alloquitur, thalamoque haec coniugis aureo
Incipit et dictis diuinum aspirat amorem:
VERG. Aen. 10, 115f
Hic finis fandi. solio tum Iuppiter aureo
Surgit, caelicolae medium quem ad limina ducunt. We also found an example of aurea being a synizesis, or of -ea(-) in general: {Spoiler: Examples}
OVID. am. 1, 8, 58f
Ipse deus uatum palla spectabilis aurea
Tractat inauratae consona fila lyrae.
VERG. ecl. 6, 29f
Nec tantum Phoebo gaudet Parnasia rupes,
Nec tantum Rhodope miratur et Ismarus Orphea.
VERG. Aen. 10, 485-489
Loricaeque moras et pectus perforat ingens.
Ille rapit calidum frustra de uulnere telum:
Vna eademque uia sanguis animusque sequuntur.
Corruit in uulnus (sonitum super arma dedere)
Et terram hostilem moriens petit ore cruento. My initial concern was, that it sounds rather weird and unlikely, but that kind of synizesis definitely is possible. It should be noted that it is rather rare, though, and that while Vergil does it with aureo, probably to mimic Homer's chryseo, he never does it with aurea, unless you consider the loci above to be examples of that. |
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Post by Pacifica on Apr 21, 2023 15:29:41 GMT
I find it hard to imagine how a synizesis between e+a or e+o is supposed to be pronounced, though. I imagine it would be very similar to, if not identical with, "ja" and "jo"... Can't think of anything else, at least. |
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Post by Bitmap on Apr 21, 2023 19:31:31 GMT
To be honest, the only thing that made me wonder whether aurea really is nominative in book 7 was that you don't usually want to give two attributes to a noun, and Circe was already capta cupidine. Then again, a perfect participle and an adjective seem to be fine ... and in that line, there are even two nouns to agree with. aurea could agree with Circe while capta cupidine coniunx is just an apposition to that.
That's the one point that gave me pause, but if you take book 1 as a parallel passage, you don't even run into the same problem there.
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Post by Bitmap on Apr 22, 2023 5:50:08 GMT
There's an article by Clifford Weber in The Classical Journal 4/1999 titled " Dido and Circe Dorées: Two Golden Women in "Aeneid" 1.698 and 7.190." His first name is the same as that of my cat, so he must have a lot of credibility. Jokes aside, he argues for the reading as nominatives. I don't think I can share the article here because of copyright, but I can sum up some of his points. Some are more convincing than others ... – An unconvincing point, to my mind, is that "aurea" is supposed to be some kind of "lover's word" when applied to a woman. It's true that there is some context for that as Circe is capta cupidine and Dido is about to get manipulated by Amor in that scene. I don't really know what he means there, though. If it means that a woman is in love, I don't really remember any parallels for that use of aureus. He mentions a passage in Propertius 4,7 – but that's an epitath. {Spoiler: Prop. 4,7}hic carmen media dignum me scribe columna,
sed breue, quod currens uector ab urbe legat:
"hic Tiburtina iacet aurea Cynthia terra:
accessit ripae laus, Aniene, tuae." – He also mentions that Circe could be "golden" because she is the daughter of the Helios, and gold somehow applies to descendants of the sun and that it's emblematic of divinity. I don't know ... I can't help thinking people make up such arguments on the spot without much underlying evidence. That being said, I discovered a similar passage in the Aeneid where Venus herself is golden, and she is unquestionably golden here in terms of metre and semantics: Aen. 16f Iuppiter haec paucis; at non Venus aurea contra
pauca refert:The non refers to pauca here in opposition to paucis. So Venus is definitely described as aurea here, either because she's a goddess or because she's so hot ... or both. Aurea in the sense of "beautiful" or "splendid" actually does exist as an epiteth for women. That's probably what it means in the Propertius passage above and also in Tibullus 1,6 (he has aurea anus there, though, so it may refer to a different quality than beauty). |
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Post by LonginusNaso on Apr 22, 2023 6:19:57 GMT
I didn't mention abietibus as an instance of synizesis but rather as another example of an author, in this case Virgil, reworking the 'rules of the language' to suit the demands of meter. If Virgil didn't delight in this use of 'synizesis', I don't think he would have insisted upon it (that is, used it multiple times & in multiple morphs: aureā and aureō). He would've found some way around it.
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Post by Bitmap on Apr 22, 2023 6:26:48 GMT
Clifford makes a few more poins that I find more convincing:
– Stylistically speaking, percussum virga and versum venenis are parellel constructions. It feels extremely weird to give an adjective to one noun and leave the other one without any attribute (that's not exactly what he says -- the "extremely weird" thing is my personal observation).
I also don't see why the virga has to be qualified as golden. I mean, why would you point that out in that context, and why would you sacrifice the metre (or use a rather ugly trick at least) to do so? Your magic wand doesn't have any need to be golden. Aurea sponda makes a bit more sense in the given context, but it has other problems.
– Syntactically speaking, he points out that 1,698 brings up a few problems if you read aurea as an ablative. For context, the lines are:
Cum venit, aulaeis iam se regina superbis
aurea composuit sponda mediamque locavit.
So, more simply, the point of the sentence is
regina se aulaeis superbis composuit et (se) mediam sponda locavit.
The -que added to mediam is postponed. That's completely normal if it is just postponed by one word, but if you consider aurea to be part of the second main clause, it would mean that it is postponed for the entire line. That's still something that is not unheard of, but another problem is that it would be a massive interference for the two sentences. aurea would be part of the second main clause, but would interfere with the first main clause since composuit is still to follow. Such interferences are fine when subordinate clauses are involved, but fucking with two main clauses in such a way sounds really strange. You would have to assume the the postponed -que should actually be attached to the aurea and that composuit is somehow toying around in the second main clause when it actually belongs to the orginal one – and all of that even though there would have been no trouble in switching aurea and composuit around if aurea is truly to be read as a spondee.
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Post by Bitmap on Apr 22, 2023 6:39:51 GMT
I didn't mention abietibus as an instance of synizesis but rather as another example of an author, in this case Virgil, reworking the 'rules of the language' to suit the demands of meter. If Virgil didn't delight in this use of 'synizesis', I don't think he would have insisted upon it (that is, used it multiple times & in multiple morphs: aureā and aureō). He would've found some way around it. Another thing that Clifford mentions is that all the e-a synizeseis (and by extention of my search, also the e-o synizeseis) appear in positions, where it is overtly obvious that the two vowels have to be read as one. Most of them are in the last foot; and in una eademque via there is no other way to read the line other than assuming that it is a synizesis. He could have done the same by switching around composuit and aurea in 1,698. I know that that would make the short -it in composuit undesirable, but it would be before a caesura. Note that the metre in the other line of the Aeneid that features an e-a synizesis is fucked up as well: una eademque via sanguis animusque sequuntur(My take was that he later wanted to revise it anyway an may have intended sanguisque) |
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Post by LonginusNaso on Apr 22, 2023 6:40:49 GMT
The virga does have to be golden, to make it even more fantastic, just as we might say 'magic wand' even though the fact that the wand is 'magic' goes without saying. And wasn't it something of an established trope, otherwise there wouldn't be a golden bough mentioned by the Cumean Sibyl? Any old hombre can wield a virga (if you know what I mean  ), but a goddess will naturally wield an aurea virga. |
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Post by Bitmap on Apr 22, 2023 6:45:52 GMT
I've been missing your sense of humour.
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Post by LonginusNaso on Apr 22, 2023 6:51:35 GMT
Your una eademque line is truly brutal. I can't even guess how they would've read that "metrically".
But I think the sanguis is a bit of showmanship on Virgil's part; he wanted to show that he knew the i was historically long. This word is perhaps the only genuine stem in -in in Latin (whereas words like hominem or multitudinem < *-onṃ or *-enṃ).
Edit: What I mean to say is that sanguīs, sanguinis is an extended (nasal-suffixed) i-stem.
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), but a goddess will naturally wield an aurea virga.