Setting: the narrator has slapped his puella and messed up her hair and he feels bad about it now, but he contemplates how she kinda looks nice like that, and then puts forth as evidence a few mythological women whose hair also got messed up but they still looked nice.
I get the sense. I just can’t get a firm grip on the grammar. I always have trouble with talis, qualis, and such like.
“Such a Cretan maiden (Ariadne) cried over the promised sails of Theseus, oath-breaker, borne away headlong on the South wind.” or something like that. “talis” agreeing with “Cressa”, nominative; the “promised ships” sandwiched between their owner and the adjective describing him, that “lying Theseus (genitive)”. Hmmmmmm, maybe I just figured it out! Is “fleo” taking the “promissa vela” as object of “flevit” (you can cry over something as direct object, right)? And then is “fleo” being used again but now in indirect discourse (tulisse infinitive), “crying THAT the rushing South wind has borne him away”?
Can “fleo” introduce indirect discourse?
I haven’t written anything in here for quite a while. I hope you will comment on this and clarify! Thanks.
You’ve just about got it Dave. In essence: she wept that the winds had borne him away. But note the double -que: what they’d borne away was both his promises and his sails (all neatly sandwiched within periuri … Thesei, as you note)—a pretty bold zeugma even for Ovid!
talis …. flevit … Cressa typically condensed for “Such was the Cretan girl as she wept …” (talis predicative)
You’re very welcome Dave. Of course Ovid is paying tribute to Catullus’s lavishly neoteric account of Ariaadne’s desertion by Theseus in Cat.64, with its unforgettable depiction of Ariadne on the shore (51ff.):
namque fluentisono prospectans litore Diae
Thesea cedentem celeri cum classe tuetur
indomitos in corde gerens Ariadna furores,
necdum etiam sese quae visit visere credit,
ut pote fallaci quae tunc primum excita somno
desertam in sola miseram se cernat harena.
immemor at iuvenis fugiens pellit vada remis,
irrita ventosae linquens promissa procellae.
etc.
Catullus had gone to town on her dishevelment. He’d started with her messed-up hair (63 non flavo retinens …), which is enough for Ovid here, but moved on down (64f.), until she ended up with the waves washing all her discarded clothes around her feet:
66f. omnia quae toto delapsa e corpore passim
ipsius ante pedis fluctus salis alludebant.
A scene which left an enormous legacy, from Vergil on through the renaissance.
And for the attraction of unkempt hair cf. Ovid’s elegiac Ars Amatoria 3.153ff., along with its allusion to the happy ending of Catullus’ tale:
Et neglecta decet multas coma; saepe iacere
hesternam credas; illa repexa modo est.
Ars casum simulat; sic capta vidit ut urbe
Alcides Iolen, ‘hanc ego’ dixit ‘amo.’
Talem te Bacchus Satyris clamantibus euhoe
Sustulit in currus, Cnosi relicta, suos.
I’m not well schooled in comparison and contrast between different authors/works in Latin, as I’m still, at best I think, at the level of a third or fourth year undergraduate student, and I’m working alone, but I know it becomes more and more necessary as one continues along the path of learning such a language. So this kind of info is really helpful for me.
