Horace, Odes, 4, 5

Latin Learning Latin
1

Context: Talking about Achilles. He doesn’t do tricky maneuvers, but bashes straight ahead in the open.

ille non inclusus equo Minervae
sacra mentito male feriatos
Troas et laetam Priami choreis
falleret aulam,

He (Achilles) would not have been locked up in that horse,
pretended offerings to Minerva
nor tricked the Trojans into phoney celebrations
nor fooled the happy court of Priam with their dancing

I had to work hard on this quatrain, even after reading the translation. Here are my grammar judgments, for which I request review.

Minervae: dative, not genitive, the dative complement of sacra, offerings to Minerva.

mentito: perfect participle of the verb mentior, passive in form but active in meaning; mentito agrees with equo, and modifies it; sacra is direct object of mentito.

Troas: I’m an ignoramus on Greek proper names, but I judge this must be masculine, plural, accusative, modified by feriatos; direct object of falleret.

choreis: I parse this as ablative plural of chorea, a kind of dancing.

2

This is Ode 6 of course not 5.

I would take non more closely with falleret. He would not have deceived, locked up in the horse that was a pretend sacrifice for Minerva , the Trojans, keeping a festival at an unseasonable time (as lewis and Short has it), and Priam’s court joyful (taking pleasure) with dancing.

I dont like phoney celebrations, its more ill timed, the celebrations are real enough just not what the Trojans thought they were. I think your repeated nor is a bit stretched.

Your grammatical analysis seems sound. Troas is I think a greek acc pl Τρῶας.

Its interesting to read this alongside Bart’s Aeneid 2 thread.

I am sure my translation in which I tried to be more literal can be improved.

3

You’re mostly right.

Minervae is genitive, depending on sacra.

mentito sacra – I think this is an instance of Horace stretching syntax to achieve extreme compression. literally, something like “the horse, falsely pretending the sacred rites of Minerva”. That doesn’t make sense in English, so you would have to make an adjustment in translating, but it doesn’t seem to me to lie outside the boundaries of what’s possible in Horatian syntax.

Usually mentitus is passive in meaning, but here it takes a direct object, sacra.

Lewis & Short mentior:

mentītus, a, um, Part., in pass. signif., imitated, counterfeit, feigned (poet.): mentita tela, Verg. A. 2, 422: figurae, Ov. M. 5, 326: fama, id. ib. 10, 28: nomen, id. ib. 10, 439; id. H. 11, 73; Sen. Contr. 5, 5, 3; Luc. 2, 512; Val. Fl. 6, 698; 7, 155; Sil. 15, 796; Stat. S. 4, 6, 21; id. Th. 1, 256; 7, 303; 10, 875; Poët. ap. Suet. Oth. 3; Prop. 4 (5), 7, 58: mentiti fictique terrores, Plin. Ep. 6, 20, 15; id. Pan. 81, 3: divinitas, Lact. 2, 16, 2; Quint. 12, 10, 76.

http://perseus.uchicago.edu/cgi-bin/philologic/getobject.pl?c.11:1311.lewisandshort

Troas is indeed a Greek accusative plural (short a).

choreis is ablative plural. It depends on laetam: “the court of Priam joyful with dances.”

This is just about where Bart is in the Aeneid right now. The Trojans have breached the walls and pulled the wooden horse into Troy, and they are deludedly engaging in festivities, thinking that the Greeks have sailed for home and the war is over, and that the horse will protect them.

I think you are correct to translate feriatos proleptically: "deceived the Trojans [causing them to be] festive and the court of Priam [causing it to be] joyful with dancing. The adjectives represent the result of the action of the verb.

4

Minervae is genitive, depending on sacra.

I dont quite see why it has to be so. But having read Austin on Virgil 2.31 “Pars stupet innuptae donum exitiale Minervae” I am convinced. Minervae is an objective genitive. The translation isn’t affected its still sacred offerings to Minerva. I have always found the objective genitive confusing and here where it could so easily be a dative is doubly confusing for me. If someone has a good explanation I would love to hear it. I am always foxed. I have read Gildersleeve 363-4 and I dont see a way of unequivocally deciding.

Edit
Richard F Thomas’ commentary observes that this stanza is an intense piece of Virgilian recomposition.

5

Minervae is genitive, depending on sacra.

Sacer as an adjective can take a dative complement, as in DIS MANIBVS SACRVM. But here it’s used as a noun, “rites” or something like that, and it seems to me better analyzed as genitive.

6

Thanks to Seneca and Hylander. For me it was a tough passage; I couldn’t construe it before looking at translations.

7

I think Horace is hard, so you should feel pleased with how far you got (most of the way!).

8

Here is the quotation again:

ille non inclusus equo Minervae
sacra mentito male feriatos
Troas et laetam Priami choreis
falleret aulam,

Paul Shorey, in his commentary attached to the text at Perseus writes:

falleret: virtually = the metrically inconvenient fefellisset.

I request an explanation of this comment, which like nearly all of Shorey’s notes, is way over my head. I understand why the pluperfect subjunctive would be “metrically inconvenient”, but I don’t understand why Shorey thinks it would be good grammar. Is there a sequence of tense issue, with respect to the perfect participles “inclusus” and “mentito”?

9

Is there a sequence of tense issue, with respect to the perfect participles “inclusus” and “mentito”?

The imperfect subjunctive would normally indicate continued action and the pluperfect subjunctive would indicate a finished action. Either could follow forms which relate to the past.

10

Thanks, Seneca; now I want to ask about the grammatical principle applied with falleret. I repeat the quotation.

ille non inclusus equo Minervae
sacra mentito male feriatos
Troas et laetam Priami choreis
falleret aulam,

So, the subjunctive falleret here occurs in an independent sentence stating a condition contrary to fact, in this case an impossible thing: because of his nature, Achilles would not have acted by such deception. In the next quatrain ureret is used to declare what Achilles would have done; but he did not do this either, for he was killed before the sack of Troy.

As I read A&G, such subjunctives fall under the head of the “Potential Subjunctive”.

Have I got the grammar and the cultural literacy right?

11

This is what Richard F. Thomas says in his commentary which I have now managed to look at. (you can ignore most of it unless you are interested. I was interested to see that the imperfect subjunctive may be a deliberate choice rather than a matter of metrical convenience.)

“falleret…ureret: imperfects for pluperfects in the apodosis of a past counterfactual. Possibly an archaism, and certainly a feature of early Latin, but Clackson and Horrocks 2007: 213 note that ‘at least until the time of Livy the imperfect subjunctive continued to be used to refer to the past in certain special circumstances, i.e. with the distinctive sense of “it was likely/going to be the case that X”: e.g. quas si occupauissent, mare totum in sua potestate haberent (Caesar de bello Ciuili 3.111.4), meaning “if they had seized these (ships) [pluperfect], they were likely/destined to have the whole sea in their power [imperfect]”, rather than simply “would have had”’. K–H note S. 1.6.79–80 si qui uidisset… crederet.”

I think that we have an unstated protasis "If A. were not dead ". That he is dead is established in 9-12 “procidit”. I think its more helpful to think of it this way rather than potential subjunctive.

In any event you have understood what Horace wrote.

12

Thanks, Seneca, for the grammatical reference and the helpful commentary.