Hello everybody!!
This is from Ovid’s Metamorphoses:
“(…) principio terram(…)magni speciem glomeravit in orbis.”
I don’t get the sense of this preposition here. “in” seems to indicate a place where he gathered the stuff which I’m not sure whether it is “terram” or “speciem”. Gathering the species in this context doesn’t make much sense, I think, so I guess “terram” is the actual direct object of “glomeravit”? But what I don’t get is “in orbis”: he gathered the earth into the orbits?
I don’t think there’s any way that “in” can possibly refer to “orbis”. I think it must go with “speciem”, which I think here must mean something like “shape”: “he gathered the earth into the shape of a great ball” or something like that. “Species” is probably one of the least-used meanings for “species” in English. The primary sense is the way something looks.
Thanks! I think I got it now. Is this a common thing for the preposition “in” to refer to stuff that comes before it? As far as I remember, I didn’t see this behaviour before.
I’ve been reading sections of the Metamorphoses for a while now with a good deal of help from the commentaries and the people here, and it seems like you can toss your rule book for prose syntax out the window when reading poetry. (To answer your question, it seems to me “in” usually precedes the noun it goes with, but not always). You have to rely heavily on correctly identifying all the various inflections you encounter and matching them up carefully with the words they modify. “Orbis” has to be nominative or genitive singular, so trying to make it work with “in”, which only takes the accusative or ablative cases, can’t possibly be right.
But there are patterns in the syntax that can help guide you, like in the line you were working with:
“parte foret, magni speciem glomeravit in orbis”, notice that the 5-word sequence is wrapped up to form a unit by placing “magni” and “orbis”, which go together (both genitive), at either end with “in” and “speciem”, which also go together, inside of those, and finally “glomeravit” in the center. Symmetries like that can often help you, especially “chiasmus” which I think these 5 words form an instance of. Another which you may often encounter is a Golden Line, a pattern that takes up a whole line with 5 words arranged like this: ABVAB, where the A words go together grammatically, the B words go together too, and the verb sits in the middle.
To leisulin’s excellent exposition I’ll add only, what is perhaps obvious, that the word following the preposition coheres very closely with the accusative noun.
Ovid’s et valui poenam fortis in ipse meam in the Amores (Am.1.7.26) is a nice example.
You can achieve effects in verse (especially in Ovid!) that you can’t in prose.