Beginner with question

Latin Learning Latin
1

I am at the beginning stages of trying to teach myself Latin.

I came across an irritating problem in my Latin text, and I have no teacher to consult about it.

I’m reading through an edited, simplified version of the Gallic Wars. I come across the sentence:

“Caesari cum id nuntiatum esset eos per provinciam nostram iter facere conari, maturat ab urbe proficisci et quam maximis potest itineribus in Galliam ulteriorem contendit et ad Genavam pervenit.?

So I ask myself, what the hell is the “i? doing on the end of Caesar?

There is no footnote about it, implying it should be obvious–and no doubt it should, but I am too dense to construe it. Am I meant to read it as something like “as for Caesar…?? (The i is printed with a macron, so it doesn’t look as if it’s a typo.) Maybe it’s some construction the text explained but I missed–but it’s not accounted for in their summary of the uses of the dative.

Thank you for indulging my ignorance.

2

There’s often a tendency, which I’ve noticed a lot reading the Gallic Wars, for a word to be pushed to the beginning of a sentence, even if that means being put ahead of the conjunction of that introduces the clause it belongs to. So here, it’s as if it were

Cum id Caesari nuntiatum esset eos per…

and then it’s just a normal dative, “to Caesar.”

3

To clarify, any Roman name like “Caesar” is declined like a third declension noun. Id est:

Caesar
Caesaris
Caesari
Caesarem
Caesare
4

Thank you. I see it was obvious, after all. For some reason my poor little brain shut down and forgot to let me know that the dative went with nuntiatus. Sheesh. :blush: