Horace Satire 1.1

Latin Learning Latin
1

I picked up my Loeb edition of Horace’s Satires today just for fun and I came across this part in the first satire which really bothered me:

‘o fortunati mercatores’ gravis annis
miles ait, multo iam fractus > membra > labore

My question is on line 5, with the word membra. I don’t know how membra fits into the sentence. It’s not an ablative of respect (the soldier isn’t “broken” with respect to the membra), but it doesn’t seem to go with fractus because it’s ending is that of a neuter plural. Fractus seems to go with miles, but then how does membra fit in the sentence? My guess is that this is one of Latin poetry’s weird singular-plural things where membra does, in fact, go with fractus. In this case, it should really be fracta, but it stays fractus just so that the rhythm is preserved?

My best translation would be:
“O fortunate merchants” says the soldier, heavy with years, his limbs now broken with heavy work.

Also, is there such thing as the -is ending for -ēs (the nominative/accusative plural of 3rd declension)? I feel like I encounter this a lot but I never learned about it. In lines 1-3 of Horace’s 1st Satire, I believe sequentis is a different way of saying sequentēs, correct?

Qui fit, Maecenas, ut nemo, quam sibi sortem
seu ratio dederit seu fors obiecerit, illa
contentus vivat, laudet diversa > sequentis> ?

2

“fractus” does indeed go with “miles”.

“membra” is accusative plural. It’s a “Greek accusative”: “The so-called synecdochical or Greek Accusative, found in poetry and later Latin, is used to denote the part affected” (Allen and Greenough 397 b, see there for examples).

https://dcc.dickinson.edu/grammar/latin/idiomatic-accusatives

I hope this helps!

Edit: Yes, -is instead of -es as the accusative plural ending is frequent in some writers like Virgil and Horace (depending on the edition you use).

3

Yes, this helps a lot. Thank you! I had no idea there was such a thing as a Greek Accusative / Accusative of Specification. That idiomatic use might take a while to get used to.