I have a few questions about this sentence in my textbook where it deals with the ut + subjunctive constructions:
Hortensius tanta memoria fuit ut omnia cogitata verbis iisdem redderet.
The most difficult part is finding the subject of fuit. Is it Hortensius or tanta memoria? On one hand “Hortensius was such a memory” sounds pretty bad in English (maybe not so in Latin but I don’t know). Is tanta memoria in the ablative? so there is an implied cum as in “Hortensius was with such a memory that…”?
On the other hand having tanta memoria as the subject makes Hortensius in the nominative afloat from the rest of the sentence. Is this a disjuncted nominative that merely introduces the topic of the paragraph?
omnia cogitata
This phrase is also difficult to understand. I know what the latter part of the sentence literally means:
that he would return all thought-upon things in the same words
Still, it does not make much sense. What is it that I am missing here?
For reference, the sentence looks like a pedagogical rewrite of the following. I didn’t mention this up until here because the original is too hard for me to understand but I thought it would be wise to quote it for the sake of providing the context for my question.
301 (Hortensius). Primum memoria tanta {erat), quantum
in nullo cognovisse me arbitror, ut, quae secum commentatus esset,
ea sine scripto verbis eisdem redderet, quibus cogitavisset.
“memoria” here is an ablative, which if I remember correctly is called the ablative of description, since it describes. So “tanta memoria fuit” = “was of such a great memory” = “had such a great memory”.
For the rest, first “reddo” itself has a number of meaning and here I would take it to mean “repeat” or “recite” (i.e. “give back in speech”). For “omnia cogitata” it means “everything he had thought”. The original is clearer in this respect because it says “he would repeat those things without writing in the same words with which he had thought those things.” Hopefully that clears it up.
Yeah, in fact right after I posted this, I read in another textbook about this use of the ablative; the ablative is used without cum for a person or people to describe their characteristics etc.
Could someone translate the second line of the original?
quantum in nullo cognovisse me arbitror, ut, quae secum commentatus esset
I understand all words there but cannot put them together into a meaningful sentence.
I think it should be “quantam” and go with “tanta memoria” – I’m having trouble representing it as a relative clause in English so I’ll cheat: “memoria tanta erat, quantum in nullo cognovisse me arbitror, ut, quae secum commentatus esset,…” = “he had such a great memory (and I believe I have not known such a great [memory] in anyone) that the things he had deliberated on…” Some of these words have technical meanings so it’s useful to check them out in a more thorough dictionary like this entry for commentor where you see that it has the meaning of preparing one’s speech.
Firstly, I tell you he had a memory such as no one I ever knew, to the extent that, whatever he would have studied earlier by himself, he would render[/deliver] in the same words as those he had intended without a script.
