Loci Antiqui 1 and Loci Immutati 4

Textbooks Wheelock's Latin
1

Hey everybody -

Just got through Chapters 1 - 40 of Wheelock’s. I started in on the Loci Antiqui and Loci Immutati. Is it just me, or did the level of difficulty significantly increase from between Chapter 40 and the Loci Antiqui?

Loci Antiqui 1:

I’m having trouble with the second line. The first two lines are:

“Miser Catulle, desinas ineptire,
et quod vides perisse perditum ducas.”

The first line is pretty straightforward: “Miserable Catullus, (let you) stop playing the fool…”
The second line has got me all kinds of messed up: “and what you see to have destroyed (let you) lead to destruction”

It’s the four verbs in a row that’s killing me. Can’t make heads or tails of it. And is “quod” functioning as a relative pronoun or as the conjunction “because”?

Loci Immutati 4:

“Multas per gentes et multa per aequora vectus
advenio has miseras, frater, ad inferias,
ut te postremo donarem munere mortis
et mutam nequiquam adloquerer cinerem,”

And here’s my go at this (have trouble with line 3)

“Having been carried through many nations and many seas
I come, brother, to these miserable offerings of the dead,
so that I might finally give you ________
and address your mute ashes in vain.”

“munere” in line 3 is ablative, and then mortis is genitive. Is “munere” in line 3 an ablative of means: “so that I might give you, by means of a gift”? And then how would mortis function and what would it modify?

Thanks in advance for any help!

2

It’s the relative pronoun. The main clause is et perditum ducas and is tricky because duco has the meaning here of something like “regard” or “consider”. So, in awful English: “regard as lost this thing which you see to have been lost.” The poet has seen his affair fall apart, and is now telling himself to accept that it is over.

We’re used to verbs of giving working like this: you give something (acc.) to someone (dat.). But the construction Catullus uses here is easier to understand if you take dono as meaning “to present”: you present someone (acc.) with something (abl.). “That I might present you with the duty of death.” That is, he has come to give his brother that service which is due to a dead person.

Also, we might take postremo as a form of the adjective postremus, agreeing with munere, rather than as an adverb.

3

Craig -

Apologies for the late response, but tibi gratias ago! This makes things a lot clearer in both passages.

-Brian