Ecloga VI

Latin Learning Latin
1

I was really rusty with my Latin poetry yesterday so I went over the same material today. Did better than yesterday – looking at it with fresh eyes helped – but I’m not sure about ll.11-12:

…nec Phoebo gratior ulla est
quam sibi quae Vari praescripsit pagina nomen.

I think I’ve got most of this but I can’t make sense of “sibi”. I’m leaning towards agreement with “Phoebo” – “Phoebus himself” – but I would expect “ipsi” in that sense. Also the dictionary cites these lines as an example for “praescribo” but phrases it “sibi nomen”. How I see it:

“Nor is anything more gratifying to Phoebus than what page (nominative) prefixed the name of Varus.”

Ed: I thought I made a mistake yesterday when I linked “ulla” to “pagina” and that I corrected it today as “gratior ulla est” but “ulla” is decidedly feminine singular and doesn’t mean “anything”. I’m now thoroughly confused. “Nor is any page more gratifying to Phoebus than that which prefixed the name of Varus”?

I read mwh’s post below (tips for reading Horace) and I try to take it as it comes but it’s my instinct to look ahead to see the subject(s), what adjective goes with what noun, et cetera. Nevertheless I’m sometimes able to do it (and have a great sense of satisfaction from doing it) but when I’m having trouble with a passage I have to step back and “decode” it. Obviously I can’t even do that all the time (or else I wouldn’t be making this post). Any advice?

Ed: while I’m at it, lines 10-11:

…te nostrae, Vare, myricae,
te nemus omne canet.

There’s no verb with “nostrae myricae” so I take it either there’s an elliptical verb of “sing” or “sound” or something like that, or “canet” goes with “my pipes” as well except that it’s attracted to the singular “nemus”. Am I right here?

2

nec Phoebo gratior ulla est
quam sibi quae Vari praescripsit pagina nomen.


Your difficulty isn’t with the Latin–it’s with the unusual thought. The page is personified as if it wrote its own heading: the name of Varus, in the genitive, as the author. The title would be in the nominative, but the genitive of the author’s name would be first, like P. Vergili Maronis Eclogae. He has put Vari in the genitive, dependent on nomen, to mirror the case in which it would appear on the page.

“nor is any page more gratifying to Apollo than the page which prefixed to itself [sibi . . . praescripsit] the name of Varus .”

As for decoding, you will have to do that from time to time. You will do it less and less the more you read and become more in tune with the unfamiliar way Latin poets express themselves. That’s why they’re poets–they write in unfamiliar ways.

te nostrae, Vare, myricae,
te nemus omne canet.

Yes, canet is shared by both myricae and nemus omne even though it’s singular.

3

[Once again I find I’m subsequent to Qimmik. But I’ll post this anyhow.]

You’ve got it. As you say:

“Nor is any page more gratifying to Phoebus than that which prefixed the name of Varus”

…nec Phoebo gratior ulla est
quam sibi quae Vari praescripsit pagina nomen.

As it comes, literally: “nor to Phoebus is any (something/someone fem.sing.) more welcome than sibi(for her/it/himself) who/which(nom.fem.sing.) of Varus (has)prefixed page(nom.fem.sing.) name.”
Looks crazy like this I know but it all fits together as you read it.

ulla quae … pagina all nom.fem.sing., “any page which”. pagina is brought into the relative clause (so literally “any which page”). Antecedents are often attracted into their relative clauses. It’s pagina which resolves the question of what ulla and quae are referring to.

sibi reflexive dative, belonging within the relative clause although preceding the quae: relative pronouns don’t always come quite at the beginning of the clause in verse. Goes with praescripsit: “prefixed to itself.”

Vari … nomen: Varus’s … name. Direct object of praescripsit. sibi is indirect object. The page has written Varus’ name at the head of itself. It’s phrased as if the page itself wrote the title.

The last three words pull it all together: praescripsit pagina nomen: verb, subject, object.

So “and no page is more gratifying to Phoebus than that which has prefixed to itself the name of Varus.”

But that ruins the force of the word order. Ideally you won’t neeed to translate it at all, since by the time you reach the end you’ll have understood it.

Certainly you may sometimes need to step back to see what goes with what, rather than just registering that as the sentence progresses. That’s ok! But do try to cultivate progressive reading.

…te nostrae, Vare, myricae,
te nemus omne canet.
You have that right too, more or less. The verb agrees with the nearer subject. myricae are not “my pipes”, though, if that’s how you were taking it.
“you our tamarisks, you the entire grove will sing.” Framed by te … canet. It’s you who’ll be the subject of song. The myricae and the nemus establish the pastoral setting.

4

Oddly, the on-line L&S won’t recognize myrica. But mwh has it right–it’s tamarisks, not pipes.

5

I actually wasn’t sure what a tamarisk was but I saw a secondary definition that was something like “reed” (I forget the exact word but it was something like that) and stretched “reeds” to “pipes”. Seeing what a tamarisk is it would make a lot more sense with “nemus” (but reading it as “reeds” was easier and would fit the context). My bad.

Thanks to you both for the help. I hope to get to the stage where I can parse ll.11-12 but that’s a ways off. I’ve got to practice more, I guess.

6

You want to get beyond the stage where you have to parse what you read. But you more or less figured this out yourself–it’s just that the literary conceit of the page itself writing its own heading is a little odd. That’s why sibi didn’t seem to fit the sentence. I think that conceits like this will come to pose fewer difficulties as you read more Latin poetry.

7

https://www.google.com/search?q=tamarisk&biw=1920&bih=934&tbm=isch&tbo=u&source=univ&sa=X&ved=0CIYBEIkeahUKEwjh2Mev7sTHAhUB9IAKHSopBI0

8

One further point: I was wrong to claim that Varus was a poet–Varus was apparently the subject of someone’s long epic poem, not the author of the poem. Varus is probably P. Alfenus Varus, consul suffect in 39, but he was not someone whose military exploits warranted an epic. The other candidate is apparently P. Quintilius Varus, whose was killed along with his legions by the Germans in 9 CE, but he would have been too young. (Augustus was said to have gone about about exclaiming, Quintili Vare, redde legiones!, “Quintilius Varus, give me back my legions!”. Suetonius, Diuus Augustus, 23.2) So the identity of the Varus of Ecl. 6 is something of a puzzle, but in any case he was not the author of the “page” but rather the subject.

Ecl. 6 is a kind of compliment to Varus, however, implausibly suggesting that his military exploits were worth an epic. But the opening of the poem is a recusatio, a refusal by the poet to write a long epic about wars and instead his insistence on writing shorter, finely crafted poems about love or erotic myths (the more perverse the better) or other non-bellicose topics. This was almost a cliche in the earlier poets of the Augustan era (the so-called “neoteric poets”), who took this aesthetic from the Hellenistic Greek poets, particularly Callimachus. Horace, and I think Propertius, adopted this pose, and Ovid, who belonged to the next generation, wittily parodies it in Amores 1.1.

Silenus’ song in Ecl. 6 is almost a catalogue of the types of poetry that these poets wrote, which included “didactic” poetry taking Hesiod as the model and rejecting Homer. The opening lines of his song are reminiscent of Lucretius. Aratus was the Hellenistic model of the “didactic” genre, and Vergil went on to write the Georgics–the most finely wrought poetry ever written in Latin (at least in my judgment and based on what I’ve personally read. I have to admit, though, that I’ve haven’t read Silius Italicus, Manilius, Statius, Valerius Flaccus and so much else, so I probably shouldn’t be making sweeping generalizations. And who knows, maybe the caccata charta of Volusius were really much better than Catullus gave them credit for being).

The big surprise was that Vergil ultimately turned his back on the neoteric aesthetic and wrote the Aeneid–a long epic poem of exactly the sort he said in Ecl. 6 he wouldn’t write. The older view was that the Eclogues and the Georgics were just a preparation or training-ground–a propaideusis–for the Aeneid, and in some sense they turned out to be just that, but in fact the Aeneid was a complete and astonishing about-face from the kinds of poetry represented by the earlier works.

Incidentally, Silenus’ song in Ecl. 6 seems like a template for Ovid’s Metamorphoses, starting from the beginning of the world and running through a series of erotic myths.

9

Thanks for the post! Lots of useful information.

I’m consciously trying to read taking the words as they come but unfortunately I can’t do that while reading for meter at the same time, but reading sequentially is the weaker skill right now so that takes precedence.

One thing that puzzles me. (Ed: figured it out. Didn’t recognize a vowel long by position - oops)

10

Why not read sequentially and then, once you understand it, re-read metrically?

11

Yeah, that’s what I’ve been doing.

12

I’d invert this. Read metrically first (it will tell you whether puella is nom. or abl. for instance, and may help in determining what goes with what) and then read it for sense. And then read it again taking in both meter and sense, and how the one complements the other.

But whatever works best for you.

13

That’s a thought, though I’d be a bit concerned that in reading first for meter I’d lapse into looking forward and backwards in the text to try to make sense of it before reading for sense. But I’ll give it a try next time I do this.

Lines 74-77

Quid loquar aut Scyllam Nisi, quam fama secuta est
candida succinctam latrantibus inguina monstris
Dulichias uexasse rates et gurgite in alto,
a, timidos nautas canibus lacerasse marinis;

This is a reference to an episode from the Odyssey and the Cambridge edition seems to presume that the reader has a knowledge of it. I think I’ve got it figured out – it gave me some amount of trouble, though.

Why should I speak of the Nisian(?) Scylla, who has been pursued by the story that she attacked the Dulichian ships, being girded as to her bright loins with barking monsters, and with the deep waters in high (with high waves?): a! and that she tore the frightened sailors to pieces with her sea dogs?

I’m taking the acc/inf to go with “loquar” (with that being deliberative subjunctive). Ed: no, it’s with “fama”.

14

Basically, you have this right. The acc. + inf. construction depends on fama.

fama secuta est is active, not passive. The subject is fama and the direct object is quam, i.e., Scylla.

Scyllam Nisi – “Nisu’ daughter Scylla.” However, Nisus was the father of a different Scylla. Their story is told at the beginning of Book 8 of Ovid’s Metamorphoses.

Nisus was king of Megara, and he had a purple lock of hair. Legend had it that only if the purple lock was cut could Megara be captured. When Minos besieged Megara, Nisus’ daughter Scylla saw Minos from the battlements and fell in love. She cut off the purple lock while Nisus slept and betrayed the city to Minos, for which Minos put her to death.

Either Vergil is confused here, or he is referring to another version of the Scylla myths (a version that apparently isn’t found in any other sources) in which both Scyllas were the same. The Alexandrian poets and their Roman followers liked to lend support, in a subtle, allusive way, to obscure alternative variants of standard mythological stories, demonstrating their mythological learning.

You got the “Greek” accusative right: candida succinctam inguina.

gurgite in alto – gurges is a whirlpool; altus can mean both “high” and “deep”; here, “deep.” Vergil is apparently conflating Scylla and Charybdis.

Quid loquar – “why should I mention”. This is a “praeterition”: he elaborates on the myth in the course of saying that he isn’t going to mention it. Here it’s a strategy for introducing variety in the ways he narrates the myths.

Note that aut is coordinate with aut in the next myth–Philomela–which also depends on quid loquar. However, he varies the construction: Scyllam is an accusative direct object of loquar (a somewhat stretch of normal syntax), and the myth is told in a relative clause, while in the case of Philomela, the myth is told in an indirect question introduced by ut – i.e., quid loquar ut – "why should I tell how . . . ". Again, a praeterition.

a! – this is a favorite interjection of the Alexandrian poets and the Roman neoterics. It lends pathos, especially when combined with a direct address in the 2d person sing. to a character (“apostrohphe”). It has already been used twice in Ecl. 6, in lines 47 and 53. It was used in Ecl. 2.69, which 6.47 echoes (a {uirgo infelix/Corydon Corydon} quae te dementia cepit?), and it will be used again in three consecutive verses (47-49) in Ecl. 10. This device goes back to the Iliad, where the poet poignantly addresses Patroclus directly this way several times (I think) when his death is imminent (and other characters about to die, too).

15

Thanks. I can’t claim credit, though, for the Greek accusative as it (and “secuta fama est”) were suggested by the notes.

But speaking of the accusative: I just got done with the (a?) uses-of-the-accusative chapter in Mastronarde in which he spends a few pages on the external and internal accusatives and the accusative of thing effected. Does this distinction make any difference or is it just grammarian hair-splitting? In the index the internal accusative is referred to that chapter and nowhere else, but you never know. I learned the material but I’m just wondering how much weight to give it when reviewing. Ed: I guess the internal object can be an important concept in certain constructions, and that you can more or less forget the technical terms once you have a grasp of it. Is there a useful distinction between external and accusative of thing effected?

16

The “internal” accusative and the “accusative of the thing affected” are more common in
Greek than in Latin.

17

Thanks. I’ve read through the seventh eclogue (it’s about the easiest along with the third) and as far as I know I basically understand it but I want to read it again in its entirety, paying especial attention to sequence and meter, and making sure I’ve really got it right. I’ve been neglecting it since I got to chapter 19 in Mastronarde, which for a few reasons is a good pausing point to review the material thus far, and because I struggled with chapters 18 and 19 at first (introducing the future and aorist respectively: if I hadn’t been paying attention to principal parts from the beginning I would have been sunk by two-and-a-half pages of verb forms to learn). I started chapter 20 this morning and that’s going to take more studying. But I should have time for the Latin, especially on a Saturday.

Really one of the reasons I’m focusing on Greek is also that I want to get to the critical-mass “I’ve come this far; no way in hell am I quitting now” stage. In Wheelock’s Latin that came around chapter 25 (of 40; Mastronarde has 42) and I’m hoping it will work about the same way here. I’m making sure to learn the material, of course, but Greek is my first priority right now (though I’ll continue to read Latin, needless to say).

18

I finally got around to rereading the seventh eclogue and definitely appreciated it more, moreso than the previous times I had reread eclogues. I think reading sequentially helps. You could get lost in this stuff – it seems that you could read it several times and if anything get more out of it. I’ll start the eighth tomorrow. Chapter 23 in Greek looks to be hellish – it introduces the -μι verbs and their compounds, and I’ll have to do a dreadful amount of vocabulary and memorize new conjugations – so I’ll be aiming to finish the eclogue before then.

The Cambridge edition is great but one thing that would improve it is an index of proper names and their long vowels. As it is there’s some amount of trial and error which slows you down, which would be unnecessary if they just included that.