Romani! Si umquam ullo in bello fuit...

[pmda]

"Romani! Si umquam ullo in bello fuit quod primum dis immortalibus gratias ageretis, deinde vestrae ipsorum virtuti, hesternum id proelium fuit.

Romans! if ever there was in any war a reason you might do thanks first to the immortal gods and then to [your] the courage of your own selves, yesterday's battle was it.

[Qimmik]

Good!

[swtwentyman]

I'm having a little bit of trouble here. What is "quod" doing? "A reason" isn't listed in Lewis & Short; it would make more sense as a relative pronoun ("if ever in any war were (such a thing) to give thanks for...") but that collapses later in the sentence. (Or does it? "If ever there were such a thing to give thanks for, first to the immortal gods...". But again it seems ungrammatical and would take "cui").

The second sticking point is the subjunctive imperfect. This would make a bit of sense as a relative clause of characteristic (assuming "quod" is a relative pronoun) with the imperfect, being in an historical sequence, referring to events subsequent to the main verb, but given that I'm not sure about "quod", I'm not sure here. I can get the sense of the sentence just fine, but a couple of details are thorny here.

[pmda]

See L&S http://perseus.uchicago.edu/cgi-bin/phi ... isandshort under II.

It's an adverb and not a relative pronoun meaning, I think, 'wherefore / why'.

[swtwentyman]

Please know that I'm not trying to upstage you or take shots at your work. I just had/am having trouble with this sentence so I laid out my thought process/thought aloud.

[Qimmik]

Si umquam ullo in bello fuit quod primum dis immortalibus gratias ageretis

For the idiom, see Lewis & Short s.v. sum:

(d) Est quod, there is reason to, I have occasion: est quod visam domum, Plaut. Aul. 2, 2, 26: etsi magis est, quod gratuler tibi quam quod te rogem, I have more reason to, Cic. Att. 16, 5, 2: est quod referam ad consilium: sin, etc., Liv. 30, 31, 9: quod timeas non est, Ov. H. 19, 159: nil est illic quod moremur diutius, Ter. Heaut. 4, 7, 6: non est quod multa loquamur, Hor. Ep. 2, 1, 30.—Cf. with cur: non est cur eorum spes infragatur, Cic. Or. 2, 6: nihil est cur, id. Fam. 6, 20, 1.—

http://perseus.uchicago.edu/cgi-bin/phi ... isandshort

Imperfect subjunctive here because fuit is a historical tense.

Syntactically, this is what Allen & Greenough calls a substantive clause of result calling for a subjunctive verb, with quod instead of ut in this idiom.

A&G sec. 569:

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

No need to apologize for asking a legitimate question or suggesting an alternative explanation!

[swtwentyman]

Got it. Thank you very much.

[pmda]

Please know that I'm not trying to upstage you or take shots at your work. I just had/am having trouble with this sentence so I laid out my thought process/thought aloud.

swtwentyman reading the thought processes of scholars such as you appended to my efforts to improve my grasp of the language is the very reason why I am a user of this great forum in the first place.

In fact I had already done a good bit of worrying about that 'quod' and, thought I fully understood it, but - and see the trouble you've caused - I now have to go and study Qimmik's explanation because it seems that I understood it less than I thought.

Thank you and keep it coming.

[Qimmik]

I'm having second thoughts about the quod clause. I wonder whether it isn't more akin to a relative clause of purpose than to a result clause. The conjunction quod clearly traces its origin to the relative pronoun quod, and the sense of the expression est quod seems more like a purpose clause: "there was something because of which you were to give thanks to the gods . . ."

On the other hand, the idiom est quod seems similar to impersonal expressions requiring a result clause, such as necesse est ut.

In any case, it really doesn't matter how the expression is analyzed--it requires a subjunctive verb one way or the other. It's always good to keep in mind that grammatical analysis, while useful in understanding how the language works and in learning the language, is a construct imposed on the language by grammarians, and not something that native speakers used to teach themselves how to speak. The Romans simply used the idiom est quod with the subjunctive without thinking about it.

[pmda]

Orberg explains it as follows in the margin: fuit quod [fuit quod… = causa fuit quare…]