How I bungled a passage

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hlawson38
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How I bungled a passage

Post by hlawson38 »

I want to report the problems I had with a passage. Specifying them will help me, and maybe they will help others. Working out these errors was annoying at the beginning, but when I finished I saw the simple, clear meaning. Moreover I had a helpful reminder of some of my weak spots.

Ovid, Metamorphoses, Book VII, line 759 ff.

Carmina Laiades non intellecta priorum
solverat ingeniis, et praecipitata iacebat
immemor ambagum vates obscura suarum;

Translation:

Oedibus solved riddles baffling to the wise of earlier times,
[but] she--a dark oracle--lay headlong, forgetful forgetful of her own riddle.

Carmina: I didn't know it can be read as "riddle", so I was thinking that maybe Laiades had written some verses and released them ("solverat") to be read by others.

Laiades: Dictionary told me this is another name for Oedipus, but I didn't recall that Oedipus solved the riddle of the Sphinx, a big clue to this passage. I knew it, but didn't recall it.

solverat: I invented a fancy metaphorical meaning for this. as shown above.

priorum: failed to recognize this was genitive plural, and the genitive complement of "ingeniis". Missing the "-um" and "-ium" genitive plurals is one of my common blunders.

ingeniis: I tried to read this as ablative, and therefore came up with the hilarious notion that that Oedipus's talents enabled him to "release" these verses.

iacebat: I misread this as iaciebat, and pictured somebody throwing something. I frequently confuse these words.

vates: I failed to read this as appositive of the impled "she" of iacebat. Missing appositives is one of my frequent errors.
Hugh Lawson

Qimmik
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Re: How I bungled a passage

Post by Qimmik »

Carmina really means "songs". Here the word refers to the songs of the Sphinx, which of course were riddles. With vates, the word carmen has religious or supernatural connotations--oracle or prophecy.

Laiades -- this is a Greek patronymic. Laius was the father whom Oedipus was fated to kill not knowing that his victim was his father. It's characteristic of Ovid to use patronymics to designate individuals, requiring the reader to know the genealogy and the myth. Sometimes you get a sense that he's deliberately being obscure, to tease the reader. As in the Medea passage, this is another instance where Ovid passes over a well-known myth in a few allusive lines that are incidental to Cephalus' narrative of his accidental killing of his wife. By using the term Laiades, he recalls the myth of Oedipus killing his father without telling the story in full.

Carmina Laiades non intellecta priorum
solverat ingeniis


There's another way to analyze this--one that seems to me more natural, and that is consistent with your first thoughts: ingeniis is in fact ablative, referring to Oedipus' talents, which allowed him to solve the song/riddle. Priorum could be what Allen & Greenough, sec. 349d, calls a "genitive of specification," with non intellecta, "not understood with respect to previous men", almost like an agent, "not understood by previous men":

http://www.perseus.tufts.edu/hopper/tex ... 99.04.0001

I'm not sure which analysis is right, but I feel that soluerat ingeniis belongs together, given the positioning of the two words at the beginning of the line. This doesn't seem to me, at least, too extreme for poetry. However, hyperbaton is ubiquitous in Latin poetry, and non intellecta priorum . . . ingeniis is also a very possible grouping.

hlawson38
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Re: How I bungled a passage

Post by hlawson38 »

ingeniis: so, I could have made this out ablative--I see what you mean.

priorum: good tip on genitive of specification; using this would make possible ingeniis in the ablative, if I understand this rightly.

Thanks to Qimmik for another helpful comment!
Hugh Lawson

Qimmik
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Re: How I bungled a passage

Post by Qimmik »

The introduction to William Anderson's annotated edition of the first five books of the Metamorphoses is well worth reading (and both of his volumes, which run through Book 10, are worth buying for the notes). You can read the introduction on line:

http://books.google.com/books?id=t12AuG ... &q&f=false

Unfortunately, he didn't go beyond Book 10.

mwh
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Re: How I bungled a passage

Post by mwh »

Yes solvo can mean “solve” :D

I hesitate to disagree with Qimmik, but I find it impossible to read ingeniis as anything but ablative with non intellecta—“not understood by the wits of his predecessors.” That’s to say, your first “hilarious” thought was correct. solverat and iacebat, the two verbs of the two events, bracket the verse (forming a chiasmus with their respective subjects), and the verse-initial placement of solverat creates what is a very mild hyperbaton (cf. ambagum ... suarum with the subject rather than the verb intervening).

Oed had (note pluperfect) solved the riddle (which was in verse, hence carmina), and (note et, and as a consequence) having-thrown-herself-headlong the vates lay (imperfect, she was now lying, defeated, dead, immemor ...). I’d take vates obscura not as appositive but simply as subject, periphrastic for the Sphinx (vates a well-chosen multivalent word, obscura like her riddles, or like Heraclitus “the dark,” ὁ σκοτεινός), just as the quadrisyllabic patronymic Laiades is quasi-periphrastic for Oedipus. Ovid sets his own little riddles, but he doesn't want them not to be solved and doesn't commit suicide when they are.

hlawson38
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Re: How I bungled a passage

Post by hlawson38 »

Thanks mwh; among my many other confusions was ignorance just who the "vates" might be.
Hugh Lawson

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