from Boethius, Consolation…, Book 2, Prosa 1.
The context: after Boethius complains that Fortune (Chance, Luck) has turned against him. The lady Philosophia instructs him that it’s foolish to want constant good fortune, because the inherent nature of fortune is changeability.
The word I wonder about is marked with an asterisk.
Tu fortunam putas erga te esse mutatam: Erras. Hi semper eius mores sunt, ista natura. Seruauit circa te propriam potius in ipsa sui mutabilitate constantiam. . . .
Translation: You think Fortune has changed, turning against you. That’s a mistake. Those are her ways, her very nature. Toward you Fortune has preserved changefulness itself, a constancy of her very own.
I was baffled by the use of “sui”, and couldn’t construct a meaning for it, before I read James O’Donnell’s commentary.
sui: i.e., “of fortune” – objective genitive, not possessive.
Having seen that I can make out the meaning of the sentence, but I still don’t get the grammatical point. Here are some questions:
ipsa sui v. ipsa sua?
what about suam to agree with constantiam?
is this the correct dictionary entry for this use of “sui”: http://athirdway.com/glossa/?s=sui
This isn’t a case of distinguishing between eius and sui (non-reflexive vs. reflexive)–the contrast here is between the possessive adjective suus and the genitive of the reflexive pronoun sui.
The thust of O’Donnell’s note is that in the phrase in ipsa sui mutabilitate, sui isn’t possessive–it doesn’t mean “in her very mutability/tendency to change,” which would be in ipsa sua mutabilitate, using the reflexive possessive adjective agreeing in gender, number and case with mutabilitate.
Instead sui, the genitive of the reflexive pronoun, here is an “objective” genitive: it’s equivalent to the direct object of the verbal idea inherent in the verb-derived noun mutabilitas. Thus, the sentence means “In the very tendency to change herself, she has preserved her own [unique form of] constancy.”
what about suam to agree with constantiam
B. could have written that, but he didn’t need to add the possessive to constantiam (as we would in English) because in Latin it’s understood.
Note the force of ista in ista natura. Ista is the second-person demonstrative (just as hic can be thought of as the first-person demonstrative, “this”, and is as the third-person demonstative, “that”). You could capture this by translating, “Those are always her ways, that’s her nature for you.”
Thanks for the explanation of O’Donnell’s commentary on “sui”. I have not focused enough on these relflexives. When I look back in Moreland and Fleischer, I see that I studied this pronoun. But it didn’t sink in properly, especially the sui form.
I’m also unsure of the phrase
in ipsa sui mutabilitate
Which is the object of the preposition in?
ipsa, or mutabilitate, or the two taken together?
And of which noun is “sui” the genitive objective complement? Or does it complement the whole phrase?
The object of the preposition in is the noun phrase ipsa mobilitate; ipsa modifies mobilitate: “in that very [ipsa] changeability/tendency to change [mobilitate]”.
Sui complements mobilitate. Sui is an objective genitive, the object of the verbal idea in mobilitate, i.e., “change”: “the tendency to change herself.”
Capturing this in English is a little awkward because an English equivalent to the objective genitive doesn’t work well here: “changeability/mobility of herself.” So I think it’s best to translate mobilitate here as “tendency to change,” so that the verb becomes explicit and can take a direct object: “[her] tendency to change herself.”
Allen & Greenough 347-8 on the objective genitive:
Thanks for the reply Qimmik. Most of the time I get James O’Donnell’s commentary. He usually identifies the hard places, an insight that he must have gained while teaching this text, and seeing where the students ran into the ditch.
Here is that link again to O’Donnell’s commentary on Boethius, Consolation of Philosophy. It really is helpful.
You aren’t the first to be baffled by the odd uses of ‘sui’ and ‘suus’. In 1471 Lorenzo Valla published an entire treatise on the issue, «De reciprocatione “sui” et “suus”».