Ecloga IV

Latin Learning Latin
1

I’m thinking myself into circles with this one. Lines 8-10:

The birth of the divine child will bring forth a new golden age:

Tu modo nascenti puero, quo ferrea primum
desinet ac toto surget gens aurea mundo,
casta faue Lucina;

I’m pretty ignorant of the mythology at work here, by the way. “You, pure Lucina, show favor to the boy just now being born, by whom the iron-age race first will cease and the golden-age race will rise througout the whole world.” This seems fairly right but it would require “gens” to do double-duty, which I guess isn’t out of the question.

2

You got this right. gens does double duty with ferrea and aurea. This isn’t uncommon in Latin poetry–it’s one of the devices that the Roman poets use to achieve compression.

Lucina is a goddess who presides over child-birth.

The metallic ages are a commonplace of ancient mythical history, beginning with Hesiod. The ages start with gold and go downhill from there. Iron, of course, is the last–the current age; the child will return us to gold.

3

On the subject of scansion going on in the other thread: when reading these lines I read them metrically as discrete entities, not thinking to link one with the other, but as I see it now “aurea” and “ferrea” occupy the same place in the line metrically, and they’re both exactly one dactyl apiece. Just found that a bit interesting: I need to be looking out for stuff like that, since if I had noticed it may have made the section considerably easier. As it is I still have trouble taking words as they come: typically I’ll read a sentence through metrically a few times, then look at it to work out anything that was giving me trouble, then reread it both for meter and for sense. I think I’m improving in this regard, but it’s alien to all my reading habits.

I’m actually a bit pleased that I got this sentence right; I’ve gotten simpler passages wrong. Small victories.

4

“aurea” and “ferrea” occupy the same place in the line metrically, and they’re both exactly one dactyl apiece.

Not by accident.

5

Lines 24-25:

Occidet et serpens et fallax herba ueneni
occidet; Assyrium uolgo nascetur amomum.

“The serpent shall fall, and the deceiving poisonous herb shall fall; Assyrian balsam-plant will rise (in its place).” I can’t figure out “uolgo” or find any place for it.

6

It’s in the dictionary under vulgus. uolgo is an older spelling–Coleman’s edition favors these. In the ablative, it means simply “everywhere.”

http://perseus.uchicago.edu/cgi-bin/philologic/getobject.pl?c.20:1378.lewisandshort

7

Ah, sorry about that. I had taken it as a form of “volgus” and since I knew that word didn’t bother to look it up and see there’s the adverb “volgo”, and “volgus” doesn’t make much sense there. My mistake.

8

Lines 31-33

The new golden age will slowly dissolve the sins of civilzation:

Pauca tamen suberunt priscae uestigia fraudis,
quae temptare Thetin ratibus, quae cingere muris
oppida, quae iubeant telluri infindere sulcos.

(“Nevertheless, a few traces of the old transgressions will remain: what things tempt men to go to sea in rafts, what walls surround the towns, what things command men to plow ditches in the land.”)

There are a few things I can’t figure out here. First, why the infinitives? I take it “quae” is neuter accusative to go with them but I can’t find any reason for indirect discourse. Second, why the datives? Is it because of the compound “subesse”? Actually I just had a thought: are the infinitives with “iubeant”? That still doesn’t explain the datives though. Ablatives would make more sense – “with/in rafts”, “with walls”, “in the land” – except that I don’t think “tellus” is an i-stem.

9

Yes, the infinitives are complements of iubeant. The subjects of iubeant are the multiple quae’s, and the antecedent of each quae is uestigia. These are relative clauses “of characteristic”; hence subjunctive iubeant.

ratibus and muris are indeed ablatives. telluri is the dative complement of in-findere (dative complement of a compound verb).

sulcos – “furrows”, not ditches, here.

ratibus – commonly means just “boats” or “ships” in poetry.

“a few vestiges . . . will remain, which will command [men] to tempt/attempt the sea with ships, to surround towns with walls, to plow furrows into the earth.”

These are commonplaces of ancient poetry. Ships and seafaring are conventionally seen as a violation of nature characteristic of the degenerate age of man–seafaring was very dangerous in antiquity, and the Greeks and Romans had a horror of it and avoided it when they could. City walls were a product of warfare and ultimately greed, which were supposedly unknown to primitive man. In the golden age, the earth bore fruit without human intervention, or else people were happy to eat acorns; agriculture was a violation of Mother Earth.

When you’ve finished the Fourth Eclogue, you might try reading Ovid, Metamorphoses I 89-162, which describes the degeneracy of man through the four ages. It’s self-contained and reads well as an excerpt. It echoes the Fourth Eclogue. There’s also an ode (or epode?) of Horace, which I’ll try to find. All of these passages recall the ages of man in Hesiod’s Theogony.

10

I’ll check out that selection from the Metamorphoses. I’ve found a text but I don’t own a printer at home so it’ll have to wait until the weekend when I can get to the library. I’ve continued the fourth eclogue and have basically got to the end with a couple tricky spots:

Adgredere o magnos – aderit iam tempus – honores,
cara deum suboles, magnum Iouis incrementum.

(“Advance – the time will come – to great honors, O dear offspring of God, mighty addition to Jupiter.”)

I don’t get the accusatives here. I would expect the vocative: either that or I have the meaning wrong.

Pan etiam, Arcadia mecum si iudice certet,
Pan etiam Arcadia dicat se iudice victum.

(“Even Pan, if he were to enter into a contest with me in Arcadia, even Pan would say he was defeated in Arcadia.”)

The "iudice"s are just kind of hanging out there and they don’t seem to fit anywhere.

Qui non risere parenti,
nec deus hunc mensa dea nec dignata cubili est.

(“They who do not smile upon a parent are worthy neither of a table nor a bed.”)

Obviously this is giving me no end of trouble. “Risere” is third-person plural perfect so “qui” cannot go with “est”, which would seem to go with “deus” or “dea” which I can find no place for in the sentence; also “dignata” doesn’t work with the masculine “qui”. And where does “hunc” fit in in a sentence with no accusatives? I’ve stared at this sentence for far too long and I’m just going to throw in the towel.

Ed: I just saw that the word is “dignata” and not “digna” – “nor is a goddess considered worthy of her bed” – but the first part of the line still doesn’t make a great deal of sense. If “dignata” applies also to “deus” then we would have something like “they who do not smile upon a parent, a god is not considered worthy of his table nor a goddess her bed”. That still leaves “hunc” but it’s somewhat better, if garbled.

11

Pan etiam, Arcadia mecum si iudice certet,
Pan etiam Arcadia dicat se iudice victum.

Arcadia iudice is an ablative absolute: “with Arcadia [Pan’s homeland] as judge”

"If even Pan should enter into a contest with me with Arcadia as umpire, even Pan with Arcadia as umpire would confess that he was defeated.

Adgredere o magnos – aderit iam tempus – honores,
cara deum suboles, magnum Iouis incrementum.

(“Advance – the time will come – to great honors, O dear offspring of God, mighty addition to Jupiter.”)

This is basically right.

deum is an alternative (particularly poetic) form of gen plur deorum.

magnos honores – honores generally refers to the highest officials of the Roman republic, quaestor, aedilis, praetor, consul in order of ascending importance (I think). This was the cursus honorum; holding just one of these offices was the admission ticket to the Senate, but ambitious men sought to run through the entire cursus to the consulship.

Note the solemnity of the spondaic line: incrementum (you’re scanning and reading metrically, aren’t you?).

. . . Qui non risere parenti,
nec deus hunc mensa dea nec dignata cubili est.

Readers have been puzzling over these lines since Vergil’s death 2034 years ago. I think Coleman will give you an idea of the various attempts to explain them–I’m not going to do so, except to note that (1) dignor is a deponent, “deem worthy,” and (2) there’s an alternative reading cui non risere parentes, which has more manuscript support and is syntactically easier, but seems odd in context and looks like an attempt to “correct” a difficult text.

dignata – shared by god and goddess – agrees with the closer divinity.

“a god does not deem this man worthy of his [dinner] table nor a goddess of her bed.” This is a “gnomic” perfect.

Allen & Greenough sec. 475:

  1. The Perfect is sometimes used of a general truth, especially with negatives (Gnomic Perfect):—

“quī studet contingere mētam multa tulit fēcitque ” (Hor. A. P. 412) , he who aims to reach the goal, first bears and does many things.
nōn aeris acervus et aurī dēdūxit corpore febrīs (id. Ep. 1.2.47), the pile of brass and gold removes not fever from the frame.

[*] Note.–The gnomic perfect strictly refers to past time; but its use implies that something which never did happen in any known case never does happen, and never will (cf. the English “Faint heart never won fair lady”); or, without a negative that what has once happened will always happen under similar circumstances.

http://www.perseus.tufts.edu/hopper/text?doc=AG+475&fromdoc=Perseus%3Atext%3A1999.04.0001

One other small point in the previous verse: tulerunt scans as u u _. In classical Latin the 3r plur perf indicative ending has a long -e-, but the short -e- is an older form which crops up elsewhere in Vergil. Actually, there were originally two forms: -erunt with short -e- and -ere with long -e-. At some point the -e- of the -erunt form was lengthened under the influence of -ere, but the short -e- form was still in circulation in Vergil’s day or else he adopted a poetically archaic form. Don’t say he did it metri gratia, because he was perfectly capable of finding a way to express himself using the long -e- form if he had wanted to.

But I’m throwing in the towel, too, on the last two lines.

12

Yes. That line did trip me up and it took a few tries on paper but then I remembered about spondaic lines; I don’t know their significance, though, except that it adds some weight to an otherwise “waltzing” last two feet.

I read through the whole poem today and tomorrow I’ll see how I can do with the Tufts/Perseus selection from the Metamorphoses. The click-on-a-word-for-its-definition thing seems great – when I glanced at the first two lines earlier I took “sata” to mean “standing corn, crops” but the gloss set me right. Unfortunately it doesn’t indicate vowel length, and I’m not very good with reading off of screens (obviously the click-to-gloss is terrible for learning vocabulary). Still, I’ll try to plod along a bit until I can get it printed out.

13

Oh, and I think I’ve found something that might help with indirect questions. Recently there’s been a trend, chiefly among politicians, of introducing an indirect question and then asking that question directly:

“We need to look at how do we keep America safe.”
“We’ll learn what are they doing.”
Et cetera.

It’s a barbarism, I hate it, and thankfully it doesn’t seem to have spread into the general populace (yet, at least) but it may help just to get the idea into my head.

14

This is a somewhat cleaner site from which you can download and print the text (but without linked glosses):

http://www.thelatinlibrary.com/ovid/ovid.met1.shtml

15

Lines 91-93 of Ovid:

Poena metusque aberant, nec verba minantia fixo
aere legebantur, nec supplex turba timebat
iudicis ora sui, sed erant sine vindice tuti.

(“Punishment and fears were away/unknown, nor were threatening words chosen from the unmoving air, nor did the supplicant crowd fear their judge’s mouth, but they were safe without a defender.”)

I think I’ve basically got most of this except for “verba minantia fixo aere legebantur”. The gloss provided for “minantia” said that a participle of “minare” (“to drive”) was most likely but a participle of “minor” seems to make more sense to me. “Fixo aere” is also what’s tripping me up – I think I can feel a vivid “words plucked from the air” imagery but I’m not sure.

Also: “aere” scans as two syllables where it ought to be three. Am I reading this correctly?

16

aes, aeris, “bronze,” not aer, “air”. You picked up on the scansion, which is the clue here that this is aes, not aer.

http://perseus.uchicago.edu/cgi-bin/philologic/search3t?dgdivhead=aes&dbname=lewisandshort

The declension of this word is an example of “rhotacism”: intervocalic s > r, a more or less pervasive phenomenon in Latin. Words such as honor, honoris were originally honos, honosis and the nominative, which was sometimes spelled honos even in classical times, changed to honor by analogy; not so with aes.

The idea is bronze tablets engraved (fixo, “set”) with laws. “. . . threatening words were not read on engraved bronze,” i.e., there was no need for laws–everyone acted justly and honorably.

minantia is from minor, to threaten.

17

By the way, many of the manuscripts–apparently a preponderance of those used by Tarrant in his Oxford edition (2004)–read ligabantur: “threatening words were not bound/ratified by bronze tablets”, “threatening words were not made binding by bronze tablets.”

Tarrant adopts ligabantur in his text, though Anderson (Teubner, 1982) and Heinsius (1652, 1659) accept legebantur. Legebantur is obviously the easier reading, which is probably why (in addition to the ms. authority) Tarrant goes with ligabantur, on the principle of difficilior lectio potior (“the more difficult reading is stronger”).

It’s more likely that the more difficult reading was replaced by an easier one than vice versa–provided that the more difficult reading isn’t absolutely impossible. In the end, like all textual choices, it’s a matter of judgment on the part of the editor.

18

101-102:

Ipsa quoque inmunis rastroque intacta nec ullis
saucia vomeribus per se dabat omnia tellus.

I have an idea of what this is saying but I can’t work out the syntax. Roughly “quoque ipsa tellus, intacta, nec saucia ullis vomeribus, dabat per se omnia”. I’m thinking it’s “intacta rastro”, “rastro” being an ablative of separation; “inmunis” is nominative or accusative plural by the meter but I don’t see its complement.

That’s all I’m reading for today – I have to go to work soon. The imagery of the oak dripping with honey and the “nautica pinus” in particular recall the eclogue.

19

immunis rastroque intacta – both adjectives agree with tellus.

immunis: nominative singular. The syllable -nis is long “by position” – two consonants: -niS Ras-.

“the earth herself, immune [from agriculture] and untouched by the rake and wounded by no ploughs by herself gave everything”.

nondum caesa suis, peregrinum ut viseret orbem,
montibus in liquidas pinus descenderat undas,

These lines echo the beginning of Catullus 64:

Peliaco quondam prognatae uertice pinus
dicuntur liquidas Neptuni nasse per undas.

“Pine trees born on the peak of Mt. Pelion are said, once upon a time, to have swum through the clear/liquid waves of Neptune.”

He’s describing the voyage of the Argo, the first ship (which ties in with Ovid’s negative reference to the origins of seafaring). Peleus, the father of Achilles, is on board among the Argonauts, and he sees, and is smitten with, the sea-nymph (or goddess) Thetis. The poem describes their wedding, but focuses at length on a wedding gift: an embroidered cloth illustrating the story of Ariadne, abandoned by Theseus on the island of Naxos. The image takes on a life of its own, including Ariadne’s famous lament.

20

121-122:

In the silver age:

Tum primum subiere domus (domus antra fuerunt
et densi frutices et vinctae cortice virgae).

(“At that time men first went into houses (grottoes were their home, and both dense bushes and twigs bound with bark.)”

I can’t make sense of that second line.

Line 114:

sub Iove mundus erat, subiit argentea proles,

The scansion has the second I in “subiit” as long. It’s third-person singular perfect, right? Isn’t that supposed to be short?