In school, we’ve just begun reading the Aeneid, and already in line 30, there is a problem I can’t quite understand:
it reads (with the rest of the sentence):
(Saturnia) his accensa super iactatos aequore toto
Troas, reliquias Danaum atque immitis Achilli,
arcebat longe Latio
and translates (roughly),
(Saturnia,) angered by these things, kept the Troans away from Latium for a long time, they, thrown around the entire ocean, the leftovers of the Danaans and the grim Achilles
Now the problem: My dictionary says: Achilles, -is, m, Achilleus. In this passage, he should also be in the genitive, as seen in immitis, but takes the ending of the second declination. How can this be?
And on another note entirely, can anyone explain the imperative insece from inquam, found in Livius Andronicus’ Odyssey?
some greek nouns are quite prosmiscuous in their declination, having not only 1 or 2, but even 3 declesnion paradigms.
such is the case of achillis which might be achilles achillis, achilles achilli (but with 3rd declension forms for the rest) and achilleus achilleis.
as for the translation, danaum is a subjective genitive: the ones (trojans) spared by the greeks - the rest were killed upon the destruction of the city - atque immitis achilli: and (also) by the fierce achilles - who had waged a massacre in the war.
i have no idea what insece is, or whence it comes. nor could find in the dictionary
About the declination, I blame the greeks - the romans could never make such inconsistencies
As for the translation, I know of what you write, and I emphasised the genitive because the reliquias Danaum etc. almost makes me think of a feast - they take whatever they want and leave the rest. And they weren’t so much spared as did they flee, Aeneas even with his old father sitting on his back (get a wheelchair, old man).
…it’s half past one in the night, I shouldn’t be posting.
about this ‘insece’. This form is in fact comming from the old Latin verb insecere, -o, insexi. Inseco is in fact an old way to write Insequo, and insequo is in fact the older non-deponent form of insequor. It means something like: ‘to pursue the narration, to proceed, to relate, to declare, to say’. Like I said you find it still in old Latin works: Livius Andronicus, but also in a verse of Ennius (a verse that can be found in Gellius, 18, 9, 3). The imperative ‘inque’ is existing in Plautus and Terentius. Insece is stricto sensu not a form of inquam, but in fact a kind of synonym. But I can imagine that your professor mentioned it was a form of inquam and justifies that it was used like that because inquam is missing the imperative and so they used a form from an other verb to complete the conjugasion of inquam. And indeed that’s possible, cause we see that some forms of inquam were only used in a certain period. By the way, in fact if you follow the normal rules of appophony insequo is in fact nothing else that the Latin word for the Greek ‘Ennepe’ that we find in the Oddissea, the same form only transformed by the laws of Latin phonetics!
Actually, I found my explanation in a glossary of old Latin, an appendix in an Oxford anthology of Latin poetry. It basically reads “insece: imp. of in(s)quam”
But I guess insequo and inquam must also be the same word.
Where do you have your sources for the sound changes from Greek to Latin from? I only have books on Latin and Greek separately.
nor could find in the dictionary