Would someone tell me if I am correct in seeing a grammatical error in the bolded words of the Latin sentence below. The sentence is taken from Caesar’s “De bello Gallico”, book VI, chapter 27 (Caes. Gal. 6.27 at Perseus).
Harum est consimilis capris figura et varietas pellium, sed magnitudine paulo antecedunt mutilaeque sunt cornibus et crura sine nodis articulisque habent neque quietis causa procumbunt neque, si quo adflictae casu conciderunt, erigere sese aut sublevare possunt.
Now, since adjectives should agree with their nouns in person, number, and gender, “mutilaeque” is not correct for “cornibus” right? Because cornibus (horns of elk) in the plural is a nueter noun of the ablative or dative case; and the only plural forms of the adjective “mutilae” I can find are feminine nom and voc. So there is a disagreement, in gender as well as case, between “mutilae” and “cornibus”. I see no way to make them agree.
Gratias vobis ago.
(PS. For what it’s worth, my Loeb Classic translates the bolded text thusly: but they are somewhat larger in size and have blunted horns; and Perseus translates it as: but in size they surpass them a little and are destitute of horns)
Mutilae agrees with the implied subject alces “elk” [plural], which must be supplied from the previous sentence; cornibus is ablative of specification limiting the adjective mutilae, so literally it says: “and they [the elk] are blunted/maimed in [respect to] the horns”. The comparison is to goats, so I guess he means that they don’t have horns at all, as if they were removed (the adjective mutilus is commonly used of people with severed limbs or other body parts).
Yes. That makes great sense. I suppose I might have (if I been more learned) gotten a clue about the “ablative of specification” from the fact that cornibus was placed after sunt instead of before it.