confusion over grammar in Ovid, the next chapter

Latin Learning Latin
1

(Ceyx’s ship is getting ground into mincemeat by a terrible storm which is killing him and all his sailors)

(unda)(subject from previous lines)
nec levius, quam si quis Atho Pindumve revulsos
sede suā totos in apertum everterit aequor, 555
praecipitata cadit…

“and no more gently than if someone were to wrench
the whole of Athos or Pindus from their place and
overturn them into the open sea” (trans. D.E. Hill)

I understand the sense of this but a full grasp of the grammar is eluding me. Someone told me that past-participle plus a finite verb can be thought of as two separate actions, one involving the action the result of which is expressed in the participle, followed by the second action acting on the same object. I guess Hill’s translation reflects something like that here, but I still don’t fully understand. Atho and Pindum seem to both be accusatives, so one or the other receives the action of revello (wrench away) and the result of that action (the whole of that stuff) becomes the object of everto (overturn), with the subject being the “somebody” who’s doing all of this. Part of my problem with this is that it’s one or the other of these places being wrenched away and then the resulting object is plural. But I guess we have a similar idiom in English…

Can anyone please clarify this for me?

Dave S

2

The text I am looking at has Athon, not Atho, which is clearly an accusative.

I wouldn’t be too concerned about the plural accusative. Perhaps the idea of “totus” led Ovid into the plural. It certainly achieves the affect of something more impressive than the simple singular.

3

I have now looked at a grammar. Gildersleeve says (495) that in early Latin -ve is more often copulative than adversative.

Perhaps that is the explanation?

4

I’m using Tarrant’s OCT edition from 2004, where the reading is “Atho”. But Lewis & Short list Atho, Athŏn, and Athonem as all being used as accusatives for Athos.
I see the main problem I was having was indeed rooted in not thinking the two singular words were or could be in apposition with the plural words. I guess you feel that they are. OK. Thanks!