difficult sentence in Suetonius

Latin Learning Latin
1

Suetonius, Divii Iulii, 35.

Julius Caesar settles affairs in Egypt.

I’m really in a tangle about this sentence.

regnum Aegypti uictor Cleopatrae fratrique eius minori permisit, ueritus prouinciam facere, ne quandoque uiolentiorem praesidem nacta nouarum rerum materia esset.

Caesar let Cleopatra and her younger brother have the Egyptian kingdom, instead of making it a Roman province, because he feared [ “veritus” with reader-supplied “est”] some day the provincial setup [“violentiorem praesidem”] might become the ready-made basis [“nacta . . . materia”] for a revolution.

To get to this, I had to read “nacta” as a perfect participle with adjectival force, and to supply “est” for “veritus”. I’m not confident of this, but it’s the best I can come up with now.

2

Veritus is the perfect participle of the deponent verb uereor, which is passive in form but active in meaning. The present active participle of uereor, uerens, is not used in some classical authors; instead ueritus is used as if it were a present participle. So this is just a present active participle, “fearing”. No need to supply est – the main verb is permisit.

See Lewis and Short, vereor:

vĕrĕor, ĭtus I part. pres. verens; rare in histt. [historians]; not in Cæs., Liv., Sall., or Curt., veritus being used instead; but freq. in Cic., Nep., and Just.;

http://perseus.uchicago.edu/cgi-bin/philologic/getobject.pl?c.20:496.lewisandshort

Nacta is also the perfect participle of a deponent, nanciscor. It’s also active like ueritus, but unlike ueritus, it’s perfect in meaning, “having found”. It agrees with Aegyptus, which is feminine despite its second-declension morphology.

Praeses here means something like “presiding magistrate”, “president”, “provincial governor”.

Putting this all together, crudely, “As conqueror, he entrusted the kingship/rule of Egypt to Cleopatra and her younger brother, fearing to make it a province, lest some day, having found/obtained/met with a more violent [or maybe “too violent”] governor, it might be the material for revolution.”

3

Thanks to Qimmik for the notes on veritus and nacta. Although I looked up those words, I did not look up Aegypti; hence I failed to see the Aegyptus. . .nacta agreement in gender & number.

Key points for me:

  1. Veritus, athough nominally a perfect passive participle, is a form of the deponent verb vereor, and thus is active in meaning. Moreover it is often used as if it were a present active participle. I read the dictionary entry without grasping the key bit of information for this problem.

  2. Aegyptus, a feminine noun, agrees in gender and number with “nacta”. Make sure about the grammatical gender of nouns.

  3. Watch out for direct objects of participles of deponent verbs.

4

Very few second-declension common nouns are feminine in Latin. Most second-declension feminine nouns are geographical names–particularly cities and islands–and most are of Greek origin.