Videt multos equites Romanos, frequentes praeterea cives atque socios, quibus ipse insignes injurias fecerit.
He sees the many Roman knights, moreover the citizens and allies, to whom he has done conspicuous wrongs.
I have two questions:
-is praeterea here best translated with ‘moreover’ or ‘in addition to’?
-why the perf. subjunctive fecerit? Is it because ‘quibus ipse insignes injurias fecerit’ is a limiting relative clause?
"He sees that many Roman knights, and in addition, citizens and allies . . . "
Here is the whole sentence:
videt senatores multos esse testis audaciae suae,
videt multos equites Romanos, frequentis praeterea civis atque socios, quibus ipse insignis iniurias fecerit [convenisse],
videt etiam tot tam gravis ab amicissimis civitatibus legationes cum publicis auctoritatibus convenisse.
videt here means “he sees that” followed by indirect discourse, not “he sees” + direct object. The verb convenisse at the end of the sentence is understood with multos equites Romanos, frequentis praeterea civis atque socios, quibus ipse insignis iniurias fecerit, and is explicit with the last element of the sentence, etiam tot tam gravis ab amicissimis civitatibus legationes cum publicis auctoritatibus convenisse. So fecerit is subjunctive because it is a relative clause in “indirect discourse”.
“He sees that many senators are witnesses to his effrontery; he sees that many Roman knights, and in addition numerous [ordinary] citizens and allies on whom he himself has inflicted outrageous injuries [have assembled]; he even sees that so many and so weighty delegations from the most friendly cities with official authority have assembled.”
This is a tricolon with repetition of videt. Again, each videt means “he sees that”, not “he sees” + direct object, and all of the constructions are parallel.
Edit: I cleaned up the earlier post.
On second thought: isn’t fecerit in the subjunctive because it’s an (unusual form) of indirect statement?
Also, there’s a kind of subjective connotation; it’s Cicero’s trying to imagine what Verres sees and thinks.
Or at least, I think so.
Any help still appreciated.
Our posts crossed. Thanks. Indirect discourse, yes, I do see that now.
It’s not an unusual form of indirect discourse–it’s just that convenisse has been omitted in the second element, to lead into the third. Videt is the key–after the first element, the reader/audience would expect an indirect discourse clause, not a direct object. (Actually, the clause is the direct object of videt.) This would probably have been more apparent from the spoken speech.
Thanks. I still have difficulties sometimes with processing indirect discourse, even after having read many pages of Caesar, who makes use of it very often.
Cicero is great for my Latin, although after three of his speeches I’m fed up with his posturing and self-righteousness. After In Verrem I will read Pro Archia and then, at long last, the Aeneid. I can’t wait.
Btw, the text you quote differs a bit from the one Henle uses: frequentis …civis…insignis.. instead of frequentes, cives, insignes. Are those endings in -is an archaic form, as in ‘timeo Danaos et dona ferentis’?
frequentis …civis…insignis.. instead of frequentes, cives, insignes
These are accusative plurals of -i stems, including present participles. The -is ending was replaced by -es in the early Principate (~1st c. CE), but before that there was apparently some fluctuation. Of course, it’s difficult to be certain what Cicero actually wrote, because the spelling of the manuscripts, which in any event are generally not earlier than the 9th century, may have been normalized one way or the other. I took the text from the Perseus website, which I think reflects the Oxford Classical Text edition dating from the beginning of the 20th century.
Cicero can be irritating–pompous, self-aggrandizing, orotund. He almost makes you feel sorry for Verres. But Verres, for all his genuine crimes, didn’t do badly. He was never really punished for his misdeeds. He fled into exile at Marseilles, and later thanked Cicero ironically for driving him there–he said the seafood in Marseilles was excellent.
And Verres differed from other Roman provincial governors only in degree, not in kind. Once you completed the cursus honorum, you could count on being awarded a province to plunder. Senatorial rapacity and incompetence in provincial administration was one of the factors that led to the demise of the Roman Republic.
I hope you have some interesting questions when you get to the Aeneid. Don’t hesitate to ask. I’ll answer them if I’m able, and there are a number of others here who will step in, too.
You might be in for a long wait then, because In Verrem is a looong speech. I would be surprised if it it weren’t Cicero’s longest…