dextera, laeva: what is the viewpoint?

[hlawson38]

The problem is how to understand the relative directions denoted by dextera, laeva. Is it rightwards and leftwards from the point of view of Apollo, or from the point of view each promontory (or cape)?

And how to understand dextera and laeva? Are they to be read as ablatives with adverbial force, each with a genitive complement? Has Ovid Latinized the Greek names to produce Sigei and Rhoetei? Is there any rule for such relative directions? Relative directions is something that I have put off learning.


Ovid, Metam., book 11, verses 194 ff.

Starting a new story: Apollo now flies to the area of Troy.

Ultus abit Tmolo liquidumque per aera vectus
angustum citra pontum Nepheleidos Helles
Laomedonteis Latoius adstitit arvis.
Dextera Sigei, Rhoetei laeva profundi
ara Panomphaeo vetus est sacrata Tonanti.

My translation:
Vengeance accomplished, Apollo borne through the air
to just this side of the narrow sea of Hellespont
now stood in the fields of Troy.
Rightwards of (?)Sigeum, leftwards(?) of tall Rhoeteum
An old-time altar was consecreted to Jupiter the Thunderer.

[Qimmik]

dextera and laeua can't be ablatives, because the -a endings are short vowels. (You are reading this metrically, aren't you?) So they must be adjectives agreeing with ara. If I'm right about this, then the altar is to the right of Sigeum and to the left of Rhoeteum (latinized forms of Greek Sigeion and Rhoiteion), which means that from the perspective of the narrator, Sigeum is on the left and Rhoeteum on the right. This doesn't tell us what direction the narrator is facing, but this is the site of Troy: Laomedon is building the original walls.

There's no rule for this--it's just Ovid's ingenious way of locating the altar. You would have to know the geography of the Troad, which Ovid undoubtedly did. Not for nothing was he called the doctus poeta, and his mythological, historical and geographical learning is on full display in the Metamorphoses. In the previous lines, for example, he applies the metronymic epithet Nepheleidos to the Helle, the eponymous heroine of the Hellespont (she drowned in it), gratuitously demonstrating his knowledge of the myth (and also filling out the hexameter line). Instead of simply mentioning the Hellespont, Ovid invites us to recall the myth of Helle (or to look it up in Wikipedia). Nepheleiodos Helles are Greek genitives with pontum.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Helle_(mythology)

However, I wonder whether a Roman reader, especially one who had not travelled to the Troad, would have gotten anything more out of Ovid's description of the altar than that it was somewhere between Sigeum and Rhoedeum, two places the reader might have remembered from Homer. The reader would probably not have been able to turn to a detailed map of the Troad to figure this out, and it probably wouldn't have been worth his while to do so.

[hlawson38]

Thanks Qimmik.

Am I reading metrically? I know it's sick and wrong of me, but I read verse just as if it were prose.

Learning all alone to read metrically seems so daunting, that I have trouble sticking to the task, although I've tried it several times.

What I feel I need is something like this:

I try to scan a line.

Then I see the correction scansion, with rationale for each syllable and foot.

Repeat, with a new line.

[Qimmik]

You really do need to learn scansion--you're missing 30-40% of the substance of the poetry if you don't read metrically. The meter is often a clue to the grammar, as here, and, in particular, many of the seemingly capricious and disruptive hyperbatons that are so prevalent in Roman poetry will fall into place.

It isn't as hard to master as you think. Mark the scansion on about 10 lines a day (not neglecting caesuras) and then read the lines aloud metrically. Do this for a few weeks and it will come naturally--you'll get the rhythm of the hexameter in your head. Don't worry if at first you don't get everything right: if you follow this regime persistently for just a short time, you'll have no trouble.

After all, there are just a handful of rules to learn. Even if you didn't fully learn vowel quantities previously, you will pick them up as you master scansion.

Reading Latin verse will be a much richer experience.

[hlawson38]

Let me state again what I need.

1. I try and fail to scan a line. (This has already happened many times.)

2. An expert scans the same line for me, demonstrating the application of the rules. (I can't find an online lesson that provides this.)

3. Go to the next line of verse and repeat.

What happens now is that in the first line, I run into the ditch about half way through. I don't know how to get out of the ditch. Without correction, it's very hard to apply rules.