Context: Through his mouthpiece, a solid countryman, Horace continues to disparage fancy diet, in this case fish supposedly caught in favored places.
unde datum sentis, lupus hic Tiberinus an alto
captus hiet pontisne inter iactatus an amnis
ostia sub Tusci?
I have changed the order and interpolated two words to show my attempted reading. I’m doubtful about this translation, but it is the best meaning I can bring forth.
My conjectured Latin:
unde datum sentis, lupus Tiberinus, hic [qui] hiet,
an alto captus [sit], pontisne inter iactatus
an sub ostia amnis Tusci.
Trial translation:
What makes you think the Tiberine pike, that gasps here, was caught in the deep
Or in the river, whether tossed about [by the current] between the bridges,
Or right at the mouths of the Tuscan waters.
amnis Tusci: genitive singular, of the Tuscan water, i.e., of the Tiber.
unde datum sentis, lupus hic Tiberinus an alto
captus hiet, pontisne inter iactatus an amnis
ostia sub Tusci?
Tiberinus is the first of two alternatives, the second being introduced by an (the first an): How can you tell (whether) it was caught in the Tiber or in the sea?
Then a follow-up pair of alternatives (ne … an): tossed between bridges (i.e. in the city) or at Tuscan river’s mouth (downstream).
lupus hic Tiberinus … hiet, lit. (whether) this wolf gapes Tiberine (Tiberinus predicative). Your added qui and sit accommodate the Latin syntax to English, “whether this wolf that gapes (the wolf that gapes here) is Tiberine or ocean-caught.” But in Latin the construction is complete as it stands, with nothing needing to be “understood” or supplied. Except for hiet itself everything that follows lupus hic is predicative. You could substitute sit for hiet; it just wouldn’t convey the idea of the dead (and cooked?) fish with its mouth wide open. And the only reorganization needed to give prose word order would be with the prepositional phrases, inter pontis and sub ostia Tusci amnis.
OK, I have read up on attributive and predicative.
Query: the verb hiet functions in Latin just as a linking verb does in English? Is this what you mean, mwh? If that is correct, then that is one of the problems I had, that I did not imagine this. The other problem was what to do with Tiberinus. I never imagined Tiberinus as predicative.
My Latin restatement was never meant suggest that Horace’s latinity might be improved by me. Far from it. Rather it was meant to show the tricks I resorted to in order make a meaning for myself, and thus to give clues where my difficulties lay.
My post could have been clearer. It’s not that hio behaves exactly like sum, but just as hic lupus Tiberinus est is good Latin, so too is hic lupus Tiberinus hiat. Tiberinus is predicative in either case, but hic lupus Tiberinus hiat is a denser form of expression and correspondingly harder to translate into English. (Which is why you interpolated qui and sit, giving the sense but changing the construction. I didn’t imagine you were trying to improve Horace’s latinity!)
Consider Hic miles Romanus (est).
This could mean either
“This is a Roman soldier”—Romanus attributive (attributive in relation to miles, that is, but miles Romanus predicative in relation to Hic (est))
or
“This soldier is Roman”—Romanus predicative.
Likewise with Hic lupus Tiberinus (est). Taking Tiberinus as predicative, “This wolf is Tiberine.”
Hic lupus hiat “This wolf gapes” (= “This bass has its mouth wide open”).
Collapse the previous two sentences into one and you get Hic lupus Tiberinus hiat, literally “This wolf gapes Tiberine." That’s not a very English construction, and if we have to translate the Latin into English we might try e.g. “This bass that is gaping is Tiberine” (as with your qui and sit/est), or “This here bass with its mouth open is Tiberine.” Either translation necessarily changes the construction of the Latin.
Now, as a disjunctive question: Hic miles Romanus an Gallicus est? (“Is this soldier Roman or Gallic?”)
Equally good Latin is Hic miles Romanus an Gallicus pugnat ? (literally “Does this solder fight Roman or Gallic?")
Which is syntactically the same as Hic lupus Tiberinus an in alto captus hiat?
(Side-point: The an tells you that Tiberinus was the first of the two alternatives, the second being in alto captus—or captus could be read as applying to both Tiberinus and in alto.)
Another point. This could be expressed more clearly by attaching an enclitic -ne (short -e) to the first of the proffered alternatives: “Hic lupus Tiberinusne an in alto captus hiat?”.
Or as an indirect question, as in Horace’s sentence: “On what basis do you think you can tell hic lupus Tiberinusne an in alto captus hiet?”
That’s the construction we have in the second part of Horace’s question, which proceeds from the assumption that the fish was in fact caught in the Tiber: “(On what basis do you think you can tell) pontesne inter iactatus (hic lupus hiet) an amnis ostia sub Tusci .”
There’s a lot to get a handle on here, but I hope this clarifies at least to some extent!
Thanks mwh for taking the trouble to make such an extensive reply. I’m adjusting myself to this construction with hiet, and have imagined some possible English analogues. It helps me get used to a Latin construction when I can think up a counterpart in English, however awkward it may be.
Besides that, something new and strange seems more effectively learned when I fret about it for a while.
Yes, but do bear in mind that Latin is a language all of its own, and English analogues are not always to be found. Myself I find it helps to get English out of my head as much as possible when reading Latin. But for communicating one’s understanding of a passage to others, or even to oneself at times, our native English is of course indispensable. French or Italian constructions can be helpful too, I find, not to mention German for compounds and non-English sentence organization. Learning Chinese quite transformed my understanding of language (and of ways of viewing the world), but is predictably useless when it comes to Latin—though bilingual tbearzhang on the Wheelock board compared the two for their density of information in a short space, which you could say lupus hic Tiberinus hiet exemplifies.