Hi all
Please can anyone offer a little help with the below sentence which I’m struggling to parse. My difficulties lie with ‘quod cum merito eius a se fieri intellegebat’ with the full sentence being:
nihilo tamen setius principibus Treverorum ad se convocatis hos singillatim Cingetorigi conciliavit, quod cum merito eius a se fieri intellegebat, tum magni interesse arbitrabatur eius auctoritatem inter suos quam plurimum valere, cuius tam egregiam in se voluntatem perspexisset
My thoughts:
‘cum’ is being used with ‘tum’ as part of the construction ‘both … and’
‘quod’ is translated ‘because’ as this seems to follow naturally from ‘hos singillatim Cingetorigi conciliavit’
The Loeb translation implies that Cingetorix ‘deserved this of him’ (Caesar) but i can’t get this from the verb ‘fieri’. The best I can do is ‘he realised (it should) be done by him for his service’, but i can’t understand why ‘it should’ would be omitted here . I was also wondering whether ‘the verb ‘fieri’ can be used in the same way (old fashioned) english ‘become’ can be used to mean ‘seemly’ or ‘to be attractive’ and so might carry the meaning in this context of ‘it is incumbent’.
No doubt I’ve missed something obvious and fallen down a rabbit hole but any help would be gratefully appreciated.
No actually I think you are on the right track. Quod is the simple relative, I think, typically used where English would expect a demonstrative, it’s not causative. “This he thought to be done by him…” the thought is clearly what we mean by “should be done,” particularly taken with merito eius, “according to his merit.” The idea of “should” is picked up from context, not anything inherent in the word itself.
You did not so much fall down the rabbit hole as trip over it…
The earlier translation above is maybe more helpful than the current Loeb, which, I feel, focuses too much on elegant English, rather than (Butcher & Lang - wise) on helping the learner.
