I can't figure out the grammar of these two lines from Amores

Latin Learning Latin
1

I haven’t posted a silly question for many months, so I’ll risk this one also turning out to be simpler than I thought:

This is from Book II of Ovid’s Amores, poem 7, lines 15-16:

aspice ut auritus miserandae sortis asellus
assiduo domitus verbere lentus eat.

I understand the sense of these lines, something akin to “look how slow the little ass goes who has the lamentable lot of having to be tamed with continual lashings”. I think I understand the use of “aspice ut…eat” with “ut” + subjunctive. I take “auritus asellus” as the subject and “miserandae sortis” as a genitive of description modifying the subject. Then things become cloudy. “assiduo” and “verbere” go together, which I take as ablative of manner. I’m assuming “lentus” goes with “domitus” and that they are both nominative. I’m not getting how the grammar works with what appears to be two subjects: “asellus” the “ass” and “domitus”, its “taming”. Maybe I have to supply some word(s) which have been suppressed, or am I misconstruing some of the grammar that I think I understand?

Could someone please help me understand what’s going on here?

2

You’re very nearly there. But domitus is the participle (p.p.p.): tamed by constant beating. Now you can kick yourself!

3

Let the self-kicking begin!

So “lentus”, though in the nominative, is used as an adverb with “eat”? Is it a “predicate nominative” with “eat”?

Thanks for the response, Michael!

4

That’s right, Dave, lentus is predicative. We do the same in English, of course (Go slow!), but in Latin it still registers as adjectival, not adverbial.