hey guys, good afternoon. I just would to know how you would rearrange this excerpt to make it clearer ?
respondi id quod erat, nihil neque ipsis
nec praetoribus esse nec cohorti,
cur quisquam caput unctius referret,
praesertim quibus esset irrumator
praetor, nec faceret pili cohortem.
Hi Lucas,
Perhaps I can help you a bit with the analysis:
respondi id quod erat, nihil neque ipsis
nec praetoribus esse nec cohorti,
cur quisquam caput unctius referret,
praesertim quibus esset irrumator
praetor, nec faceret pili cohortem.
l. 9 “respondi id quod erat” can be taken as a unit. In other words, the meaning can be determined without having to look outside the clause. “id quod erat” = the truth( lit. what it was), nihil goes with esse ((they (the natives, the praetors, the cohort) had nothing..))ipsis probably refers to the Bithynians of line 7. On this there is some disagreement. ipsis might be taken with praetoribus in the next line with some other alteration.
l.10 praetoribus and cohorti along with ipsis are the indirect objects of nihil esse. I believe the construction is a dative of possession.
l.11 this elaborates on what he means by “they had nothing…”. this line can also be taken as a unit.
l.12 quibus refers back to ipsis, praetoribus, and cohorti
1.13 praetor goes with esset irrumator of line 12. “nec faceret pili cohortem”= he does not value his cohort a straw.
Fordyce calls this “a very loose” sentence and not very “logical” because Catullus is venting his emotions here. He’s upset with the results of being in Memmius’ cohort. For young men in Catullus’ time, being a member of a governor’s cohors praetoria (which sometimes included scholars and poets as well as soldiers) could be quite lucrative. The general idea here is that when he was asked about how things were in Bithynia, he told the truth: that the natives, the (future) praetors and his cohort had nothing one could call cause for celebration(that they could oil their heads for), especially when they had a praetor who was a vile person and didn’t give a whit for his cohort.
You’ve probably already worked out that this poem is written in Phalaecian hendecasyllable, which is a glyconic plus a bacchiac and looks like this:
xx-uu-u-u-- (x= anceps, u=short syllable, - =long syllable).
This should get you started. Hopefully mwh or seneca2008 will correct any howlers I may have committed and give you a better grammatical explanation.
I have nothing much to add except that I think it is a bad idea to “rearrange this excerpt to make it clearer”. It’s the kind of thing Pharr does in his Aeneid. Superfically it might be an attractive thing to do but it does such violence to the poetry that the losses outweigh the gains. Would you re-write Milton to make it more “comprehensible”? The looseness of the syntax is part of this poem.
Some thoughts garnered from various books I have to hand.
“id quod erat”
Parenthetical.
“cur quisquam caput unctius referret”
As you will have noticed referret is an imperfect subjunctive, so we have an indirect question or possibly an indirect dependent clause depending on nihil … esse. Quinn observes that “the construction develops into a loosely formulated indirect question (in place of the more regular quo unctius referret).”
irrumator is a bit more scatalogical than “vile person” . "Someone who forces others to give him oral sex, hence one who treats people with contempt. "
faceret pili cohortem is possibly also not polite. “This figure of speech plays off an earlier figure, caput unctius.”
Quinn says of the whole poem that it is “A matter of mood rather than syntax”. Several commentators (eg Douglas Thomson) draw attention to the atmosphere and tone being of Roman satire rather than Greek epigram, although it may show the influence of mime.
I mean no disrespect, but I think we can all appreciate that without much thought. We flatten the artistry of the poem in rearranging it to be more like prose. But I think we run again here into mwh’s comment from a recent post: “Make sure you understand the grammar. It’s not the most important thing (remember that), but it’s an essential preliminary” (my underlining).
If I come across some lines that I simply cannot decipher after a lot of trying because I don’t understand the grammar, then I need help from somewhere. If I have access to a prose version of the section in question that I DO understand and which illuminates the grammar of the original, then I can go back to the original and enjoy the artistry because I now understand the grammar and the meaning. Lacking a tutor at my elbow, surely it’s reasonable for me to resort to whatever aids (commentaries, prose rearrangements, or [hopefully not!] trots) I can find to help me further assimilate the grammar. Otherwise, I’m just stuck.
IMHO
Dave S
Commentaries, yes! Prose rearrangements, not so much.. I fully understand the frustration of trying to understand a piece of verse, but I think rearrangement of the verse only helps gain the sense of the passage, not necessarily the relationship of the words to one another; for that, I think it’s best to analyse the verse as it stands. Fortunately, there is punctuation to help, so rather than rearrange a number of lines using constructions the poet never intended, try to work from stop to stop. When it comes to poetry, I think the major hurdles are understanding the allusions and the diction; the syntax is relatively straightforward. From a syntactical standpoint (only!!), I find Catullus far easier to understand than Livy, for example. As far as grammar and syntax is concerned, I think what mwh is trying to say is that one must have a solid grammatical foundation before attempting poetry. Fortunately, this doesn’t take years to achieve and doesn’t mean you should be able to read say Tacitus before you start.
I’ve used Pharr in teaching. I find the prose rewrites occasionally helpful for students to grasp the sense. We then go back to the actual Vergil and compare and contrast, which is an excellent spring board to discuss the poetry and artistry. It also reveals tha the syntax is often not that complicated…
Hey guys, thanks all for your answer. They were very helpful .