The setting is right after the wild boar has been slain in the Calydonian Hunt in Book 8 of the Metamorphoses and Meleager has slain his two uncles for getting uppity and his mother Althaea is angry at her son Meleager for killing her brothers. She possesses a partially-burnt up log which she has been told by the Fates controls the length of lifetime of her son–burn it up in a fire and Meleager will die. She’s torn between revenge and having to kill her own son to obtain it.
Et modo nescioquid similis crudele minanti 467
vultus erat, modo quem misereri credere posses; 468
“And one moment her countenance was like someone threatening I know not what cruel thing,
and the next moment…you could believe that it (her countenance) was moved by pity (for her son, if she were to choose to ‘kill’ him).”
My best guess at the grammar is that “quem” is used as a connective (as so often happens) to refer back to “vultus”, and that it’s accusative because it’s used as the accusative subject (in indirect statement after “credere”) of the infinitive “misereri”.
It worries me, though, that the “quem” isn’t first in its clause, coming after “modo”, and trying to create a super-literal translation in English that preserves/reflects as much as possible the grammar of the Latin comes out poorly for me if I try to translate “quem” as “which”. I’ve used “it” instead, because it seems to me like it often makes the translation of a connecting relative sound less awkward in English if I just change it to a demonstrative like, in this case, “eum”.
Please, would someone tell me if I’m on the right track with these two lines?
Maybe you could imagine something like this to make it easier to understand:
Et modo nescioquid similis crudele minanti
vultus erat, modo quem misereri credere posses.
Your explanation for quem being in the accusative is correct, and the fact that quem isn’t the first word in its clause should not be a problem at all.
Thanks for the response. That makes sense. I’m glad to see my interpretation of the grammar was mostly right. But I have a lot to learn when it comes to filling in words that would be present in prose but have been omitted for the sake of poetry.
Hi Dave, you understood the meaning of the passage perfectly. You only went wrong in thinking that quem was being used as a connective as at sentence beginning. That would mean “and it” (her vultus), but here quem is not a sentence connective but the simple relative. vultus erat carries over from the first clause. The syntax is
et vultus erat
modo similis …,
modo (is) quem misereri credere posses.
“… at the next moment it was one that you could believe felt pity.”
In prose quem would likely have an antecedent (the pronoun “is” rather than Laurentius’ “talis,” since it’s “quem” not “qualem”), but that’s not grammatically necessary.
English similarly says “I do what I like” rather than “I do those things which I like” or “such things as I like.”
Michael
Thanks much for that reply. It seems very clear to me now. Yes, I was hung up on thinking the quem was a connective rather than a simple relative. I guess one of the clues that “vultus erat” also goes with the second clause is its position sandwiched right between them. And perhaps also that quem should have some kind of antecedent but didn’t seem to, hence my error in viewing it as a connective.