…reddidit, hibernis forte tumebat aquis:… I’ll continue my attempt to translate this piece from Ovid’s Fasti. Ex libro II]
hic ubi nunc fora sunt, lintres errare videres,
here where now fora are, you can see small boats sailing,
quaque iacent valles, Maxime Circe, tuae.
Where lies your valley (O) Circus Maximus
Huc ubi venerunt (neque enim procedere possunt
To that place where they came (for they weren’t able to go any
longius), ex illis unus et alter ait:
further, one to another said
[I’m not sure what’s happening here..is ‘they’ Romulus an Remus? They are brought to the Circus Maximus? People there are commenting on how similar and good-looking they are? - presumably Ovid has covered their actual rescue elsewhere in the poem?]
"At quam sunt similes! at quam formosus uterque!
"But how they are similar! but how beautiful each one is!
Plus tamen ex illis iste vigoris habet.
Moreover besides of [both of] them that one has strength. [who? Romulus? ]
Si genus arguitur vultu, nisi fallit imago,
If the pedigree is proven in the face, if that which is seen does not lie
nescioquem in vobis suspicor esse deum."
I am beginning to think any such person as you [pl] to be a god." […there is god in you…]
videres = you might/could have seen…
not “one to another” but “one after another of them said” or “one and another of them said” (though it amounts to the same // quam similes autem sunt sensus)…
One of them has more strength, however…
unless appearances are deceptive…
I suspect either of you could be a God
It might be a good idea to retain the deictic value of iste in the translation by saying “this one” or “that one” instead of simply “one of them”.
It could be argued that it amounts to much the same thing, I suppose, but maybe there is a subtlety worth preserving in Ovid’s way of expressing it, viz “I suspect there is some god in you”.
[I’m not sure what’s happening here..is ‘they’ Romulus an Remus? They are brought to the Circus Maximus? People there are commenting on how similar and good-looking they are? - presumably Ovid has covered their actual rescue elsewhere in the poem?]
“They” refers to the people who are carrying R&R to the river. They’re looking at the babies and commenting how good-looking they (the babies) are. The Circus Maximus clause belongs with the preceding clause: the little boats are wandering around where the valley where the Circus Maximus lies. “Right here, where today there are market-places, and where [quaque] your valleys lie, Circus Maximus, you would see little boats wandering.” There are two “you’s” here: the apostrophe to the Circus Maximus, and “you” of videres, the imaginary person standing beside Ovid around 7 CE as he points out the place in question (hic): “Right here you would see little boats wandering [if you had been here around 773 BCE at the moment when the babies were taken to the spot].” Or perhaps Ovid is addressing the Circus Maximus both times, but I’m inclined to read it as a separate apostrophe to the CM.
The amusing apostrophe to the Circus Maximus, as if Ovid turns away from the subject of videres and addresses the personified Circus Maximus, is actually a clever way of solving a metrical problem. Ovid want to say valles Circi Maximi, but the genitive Maximi, which is a cretic (long-short-long), won’t fit in either the hexameter or the pentameter of the elegiac couplet. So Ovid uses the vocative, placing the adjective ahead of the noun (Maxime Circe instead of Circe Maxime, the usual order, which wouldn’t be metrical), and the possessive adjective tuae neatly rounds out the second half of the pentameter with a short-long disyllable (the pentameter, the second line of an elegiac couplet, always ends with a two-syllable word shaped v _ or v v in Ovid):