Bellum Gallicum 5. 44. 4 — Help!!!

[Lucretius2327]

Gosh, how embarrassing! Reading Latin for 20 years and stumped by Julius Caesar!

Haec cum dixisset, procedit extra munitiones QUAEQUE PARS HOSTIUM CONFERTISSIMA EST VISA inrumpit.

Obviously the translation is "where the enemy was most dense" [there] he broke in upon."

But why is there not an ACC. construction as object of INRUMPIT? The constructions given in the mini-Lewis and Short are: [Ovid] quoqunque; [Caesar] in castra, in aciem hostium; [Sallust] cum telis ad sese; [Caesar] oppidum; [Virgil] thalamo.

Pars is fem. of one termination.

PARS HOSTIUM is a suggestion of Aldus; whereas MSS α has PARTI HOSTIUM; and β has HOSTIUM PARS (from the OCT and Budé critical apparatus). MSS α provides EAM INRUMPIT (Budé) —which makes ME happy.

What was Aldus thinking? What is up here folks? HELP!!!!

[Qimmik]

According to Lewis & Short, irrumpo can take an accusative object without in (two citations to Caesar):

With acc.: quin oppidum irrumperent, Caes. B. C. 2, 13. 4: domum alicujus, id. ib. 3, 111, 1: portam, Sall. J. 58, 1; 25, 9: castra, Just. 2, 11, 15: interiora domus irrumpit limina, Verg. A. 4, 645: moenia Romae, Sil. 13, 79: stationes hostium, Tac. H. 3, 9: Italiam, id. ib. 4, 13: Karthaginem, Plin. 35, 4, 7, § 23: cubiculum, Suet. Claud. 37: triclinium, id. Vesp. 5: vacuam arcem, Sil. 2, 692.—

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

The text you're looking at seems to make sense with eam understood, which apparaently is actually present in the α family of mss. But if α preserves quaeque but reads parti hostium, the text of α isn't grammatical. It's hard to tell, but I suspect the ms. Aldus was working from was an α family ms. reading quaeque parti hostium . . . eam irrumpit, and he simply changed parti to pars. The β family has hostium pars, and perhaps omitted eam (which isn't necessary) but that's not clear.

[Craig_Thomas]

The Loeb has quaque, so do Perseus (http://www.perseus.tufts.edu/hopper/tex ... ection%3D4) and PHI (http://latin.packhum.org/loc/448/1/0#105).

The full Lewis and Short (http://athirdway.com/glossa/?s=irrumpo) does mention qua with irrumpo, citing Pliny: qua irrumpens oceanus, etc., Plin. 3 prooem. §3.

It's perhaps easiest to understand the grammar like this: 'The section of the enemy where he burst in seemed the most dense,' though we really want irrumpit as the main verb.

But then, just to complicate things, Lewis and Short also has this citation under irrumpo: in eam partem hostium, Caes, B. G. 5, 43. There's no such construction there in 5.43, so I suppose this actually refers to 5.44.4. Perhaps an older edition of Caesar had the text that way.

[Lucretius2327]

Thanks for the notice of the earlier Lewis and Short reading.

Among philologist there is, of course, the doctrine of difficilior lectio potior — "The maxim difficlior lectio is strictly speaking no more than an application of the following general principal: Given the tendency of scribes to corrupt texts it is reasonable to suppose that careless copying or a desire to simplify a difficult passage encouraged certain types of alteration. Difficilior lectio embodies the notion that if one of the available readings is more difficult to understand, it is more likely to be the correct reading. The justification of this view is that scribes tended, sometimes consciously, sometimes inadvertently, to remove from the text the rare or archaic linguistic forms that were no longer readily understood, or to simplify a complex process of thought they could not master. Alternative terms to describe these activities are interpolation and trivialization." (Scribes and Scholars, p. 199) — but that hardly applies to such a Wittgensteinian clear and straight-forward author as Julius Caesar in the Commentarii.

My own instinct was for IN EAM PARTEM HOSTIUM QUAE CONFERTISSIMA EST VISA INRUMPIT — but the entire question makes me want to re-read BG and BC so as to deepen my sense of HOW Caesar might be expected to express this idea.

Thanks for the help, guys.