I have a few questions about this sentence in my textbook where it deals with the ut + subjunctive constructions:
Hortensius tanta memoria fuit ut omnia cogitata verbis iisdem redderet.
The most difficult part is finding the subject of fuit. Is it Hortensius or tanta memoria? On one hand "Hortensius was such a memory" sounds pretty bad in English (maybe not so in Latin but I don't know). Is tanta memoria in the ablative? so there is an implied cum as in "Hortensius was with such a memory that...."?
On the other hand having tanta memoria as the subject makes Hortensius in the nominative afloat from the rest of the sentence. Is this a disjuncted nominative that merely introduces the topic of the paragraph?
omnia cogitata
This phrase is also difficult to understand. I know what the latter part of the sentence literally means:
that he would return all thought-upon things in the same words
Still, it does not make much sense. What is it that I am missing here?
For reference, the sentence looks like a pedagogical rewrite of the following. I didn't mention this up until here because the original is too hard for me to understand but I thought it would be wise to quote it for the sake of providing the context for my question.
w w w.archive.org/stream/lecturesandessa00havegoog/lecturesandessa00havegoog_djvu.txt301 (Hortensius). Primum memoria tanta {erat), quantum
in nullo cognovisse me arbitror, ut, quae secum commentatus esset,
ea sine scripto verbis eisdem redderet, quibus cogitavisset.