A crowd is streaming into the Curia when Tarquin seizes his moment to throw Servius down the steps of the building.
Tum Tarquinius, necessitate iam et ipsa cogente ultima audere, multo et aetate et viribus validior, medium arripit Servium elatumque e Curia in inferiorem partem per gradus deiecit! Inde ad cogendum senatum in Curiam rediit.
Orberg explains necessitate iam et… as : cum iam et ipsa necessitas cogeret eum
My English reading of the literal sense of this is: 'Then Tarquin, compelled by ultimate necessity itself and by [virtue of his] age and [personal] strength to dare, seized Servius around the waist and holding him high [elatumque] threw him down the steps of the Curia.
My question is a simple one: if ipsa and ultima describe necessitate (and I note that ultima doesn’t have a macron but it’s ablative I think (I got this information on wiktionary where its ablative form has no macron)) is it odd that they come from the other side of the conjunction et to do so? I have tended to treat conjunctions as hard dividers in structure - almost a new sentence - unless the adjective is describing a word on both clauses…
So literally: and now compelled by necessity itself to venture the last resort.
ultima must be taken with audere. This is implicitly what Oberg is telling you in his explication “necessitate iam et… as : cum iam et ipsa necessitas cogeret eum”
Tarquin’s physical advantages “multo et aetate et viribus validior” are what enables him to throw Servius down the stairs. It is the situation which makes it necessary for him to act.
I think its not helpful to always rearrange the Latin in your head, in this case for example putting ipsa with necessitate. Start by trying to do it very literally. By necessity now and by itself compelling [him] to venture etc. “Iam et” is one unit sandwiched between “necessitate …ipsa” which are syntactically linked as they are in the same case. If we were trying to write this in the same style in English maybe it would be: “It was necessity then and necessity alone (itself) that compelled him…”.
I have tended to treat conjunctions as hard dividers in structure
Rather than dividers ask what is being connected and why?
Where you appear to have gone wrong and Seneca2008 appears not to have reorientated you is in assuming that et is a conjunction; it’s actually an adverb modifying ipsa.
Curiously, we had the same confusion yesterday with Greek και (kai), which, like et, can serve as a conjunction meaning “and”, but can also be used adverbially to mean “also” or “even” or as here simply to emphasize the word that follows.
As in the και thread, I think it might be helpful to skim the dictionary entry–in this case, Lewis and Short–for et to see the full range of uses to which this word can be put.
Thanks Victor and Hylander for your helpful clarifications. It prompted me to look at Gildersleeve and Lodge. 478 note 2 says that instead of etiam, et is [used]…more often when a pronoun follows, as et ille, et ipse,…it becomes common from Livy on.