How pleasing to see this wasn't just posted for my own benefit! Thank you both very much for your replies, and mwh for your proposed edits. I shall put more attempts up as I do them. I'd be very interested to see yours, Aetos, too, so don't throw the roughs away too quickly!
I agree with most of what you (mwh) put, and think it improves my original. I particularly appreciate advice about
accēdentem having an aggressive quality, and the swapping of
at for
sed.
Choosing between near synonyms is probably the thing I find most difficult with prose comp. (This is all revision for me, but I haven't done any for some years.) I still find that I choose words on their "vocabulary list" definition, and then struggle to discern if I've chosen the best of the bunch. I find using the
Latinitum website very helpful in this regard.
I too questioned myself about
in quībus relictus. It just doesn't look like what I've seen in texts, but I am now on the lookout for how connecting relatives are used with prepositions. As you say, changing this has some knock on effects for how to connect the sentences.
My
ille was trying to be a Caesarian sort of (1) There once was a fellow called "legatus" (2) "ille" did this that and the other, and the way you know he's important to my narrative is because I'm using a pronoun (3) But now I've talked about him enough i'll refer to him in verbs forms primarily... But for such short paragraph, maybe connecting relatives is the way to go.
As regards
at vs
sed again, I wonder if anyone knows of any good exercises out there for using and differentiating (coordinating) conjunctions? Reading it in the grammars really doesn't cut it for me - real, clear examples and practice would be very helpful.