Is it not ‘the woman, the desirous’ rather than ‘desirous lover’? Catulus 70

Latin Latin Poetry
1

Salvete.

I’m working my way through Catulus 70 and I’m puzzled by the third verse.

Dicit: sed mulier cupido quod dicit amanti,

The fourth verse which follows is as follows.

in vento et rapida scribere oportet aqua.

I’ve been looking online and finding the third verse interpreted as something like, ‘she says, but what a woman says to her desirous lover,’.

I’m fairly new to the language and even more so to Latin poetry but is not the word cupido in apposition with the word mulier?

I’d very much appreciate any pointers which might help me grasp quite how this verse works.

2

cupido is an adjective in the dative case so it can’t be in apposition to mulier. it agrees with amanti.

3

Thanks

4

Perhaps what confused you is the existence of the noun Cupido (Cupid, Greek Eros), Aphrodite’s mischievous son. But that could not agree with mulier, a woman, and would be nonsensical here.

Catullus actually multiplies Cupid, and even Venus too! Lugete, o Veneres Cupidinesque (3.1).

Incidentally, for anyone curious about qu, which as I said functions as a single consonant like c (cf. the spelling quom for cum), note aqua as the last word of the pentameter, with the initial a remaining short.