Hi, I haven’t posted here in a while. Been pretty busy in the past few months. I try to spend a few nights per week to work on the Locī Immūtātī, but progress has been slow (just plowed through two excerpts from Cicero’s In Catilīnam Ōrātiō, and boy does he have a lot to write about our friend Catilīna…)
I had a question about a particular sentence from article #8:
Original sentence:
Et ille, “Tu vero . . . sic habeto non esse te mortalem, sed corpus hoc; nec enim tuis es quem forma ista declarat, sed mens cuiusque is est quisque, non ea figura quae digito demonstrari potest. …”
My translation:
And that (man) (said), "You indeed … you shall thus consider (that) you are not mortal, but this body (is mortal); and you are not to your (friends) whom that form declares, but (the) mind of each (person) he is each (person), not the form/body which is able to be demonstrated by (a) finger.
Questions:
What is the correct translation of “is” in the sentence above?
I translated it as a pronoun referring to “mēns cuisque” but I find this problematic as “mēns” is feminine, while “is” is masculine…
Why is the demonstrative “ista” used to describe “fōrma”?
“Ista” usually is associated with a negative connotation, is this because it is referring to the body which is considered ephemeral?
What does “quae digitō dēmōnstrārī potest” mean?
I know what it means literally, but what do you mean by “be able to be demonstrated with a finger”?
There are a couple of errors I can see in your reading and/or transcription of the passage: “tuis” and “cuisque”. Clearly cuisque should be cuique but have you realised yet what tuis should be? Understanding the latter correctly may help you to make much better sense of the passage.
ista doesn’t always have negative connotations, by any means. Here it just means “your” effectively.
That the forma is visibly existent, essentially, unlike the mens.
For future reference, it would be helpful if you didn’t include macrons when writing Latin in your questions; they make any Internet search for the original passage more time consuming.
Yeah, I was also not quite sure what “tuis” meant, but to translate it as “to your (friends)” was what was supplied in a footnote in the textbook (footnote #56 says that “tuis” is a DAT. depending on the verb “declarat”), so I just went with it…
I double checked, “mens cuisque is” should actually be “mens cuiusque is”, I misspelled it in the original post. Does that change anything?
So I looked up the original text on the Latin Library:
Et ille: ‘Tu vero … sic habeto, non esse te mortalem, sed corpus hoc; nec enim tu is es, quem forma ista declarat, sed mens cuiusque is est quisque, non ea figura, quae digito demonstrari potest. …’
But I am not clear on the grammatical structure of the sentence. As I understand it, “mens cuiusque” and “is” are both subjects of the verb “est”? But why are we using the masculine form “is” instead of “ea”, since “mens” is feminine?
I, too, am having a bit of trouble with this passage in Wheelock’s Latin. Here is the sentence:
Quare et tibi, Publi, et piis omnibus retinendus animus est in custodia corporis nec iniussu eius, a quo ille est vobis datus, ex hominum vita migrandum est,…
I don’t understand the gerundive migrandum. It seems to be in the accusative, but it should agree with animus, masculine nominative, which is taken up by ille. Would someone be so kind as to enlighten me?
Migrandum does not refer to animus, the neuter here is impersonal. Combined with the dative, it expresses obligation: “someone has to do X” (literally something like “there is to-someone the-fact-of-having-to-do-X”).