Hello, everyone:
I have a question regarding a sentence in De Bello Gallico VIII.43:
…cum quid ageretur in locis reliquis essent suspensi,…
Translated as
…and in their uncertainty as to what was going on in the other quarters…
I’m struggling to understand how
quid ageretur in locis reliquis
relates to
essent suspensi
since suspendere is a simple passive and not a deponent, and what exactly you could call the first part if not an indirect question. I know verbs of doubting/knowing will take an indirect question, but again _suspendere_as far as I know is not taking on a deponent role. Is this idiomatic?
It’s an indirect question all right. They were “suspended,” i.e. in a state of doubt and uncertainty. We might say they were “hung up” on the question of what was going. on.
Thank you for your reply, mwh.
This might be one of those instances where I think I know what the sentence means, but I don’t know why it means what it does in detail. Is quid ageretur in locis reliquis taking the role of an object? And if that’s the case, is suspendi a deponent in this context?
No suspensi is not a deponent, with a direct object. Its governing an indirect question is more like the use of indirect questions with such words as incertus, dubius, ambiguus, etc. There’s really nothing remarkable about it.