This a passage from Ørberg’s RomaAeterna XL 229-233. Dido comtemplates suicide and, if I understand correctly, also thinks of how she might have taken her revenge on Aeneas.
Nonne ego eum et socios et ipsum Ascanium ferro absumere potui! Etiam si pugnae fortuna dubia fuisset, quem metui moritura? Faces in castra tulissem, carinas flammis delevissem, filium et patrem cum genere exstinxissem—et ipsa memet super eos iecissem!
I am not sure I understand the subjunctives or how to translate them. All I can think of is that they are actually apodoses after etiam si. Thus, I understand the sentences as past conditions contrary to fact. So, I would translate it as “Even if the outcome had been doubtful, I would have borne torches to their camp, destroyed their boats with flames, extinguished father and son with their race and thrown myself on top of them.” I would be grateful for any comments and especially for any references to other grammars.
The first sentence seems to have some mistakes. Maybe: Nonne ego eum cum et socios et ipsum Ascanium ferro absumere potui. Also, extinxissem.
The subjunctives in the sentence beginning with faces are, as you suspect, contrafactuals, though the etiam si clause isn’t necessarily the protasis. The subjunctives are simply what might or could have happened, as she imagines it – the alternative course that events could have taken. They don’t necessarily need an explicit protasis.
I don’t understand the first sentence. potuit should surely be potui, and cum should be deleted? [PS or is it a typo for eum, though that is rhetorically ruinous.]
This is a lightly adapted version of part of a furious speech of Dido’s when she sees Aeneas sailing off abandoning her, Aen.4.600ff.
Don’t elide “quem metui moritura?” after “Etiam si pugnae fortuna dubia fuisset” (“Even if the outcome had been doubtful, who was I afraid of, when I was about to die?”) The pluperfect subjunctives are literally “I would have borne torches” etc., as you rightly translate them, but in context are more like “I ought to have …”, functioning as 1st-person past imperatives or wishes.
The actual Vergilian lines are:
Non potui abreptum divellere corpus, et undis
spargere? non socios, non ipsum absumere ferro
Ascanium, patriisque epulandum ponere mensis?
verum anceps pugnae fuerat fortuna. —fuisset:
quem metui moritura? faces in castra tulissem,
implessemque foros flammis, natumque patremque
cum genere extinxem, memet super ipsa dedissem.
Charlie, you wanted grammar refs too. For Allen & Greenough it seems these pluperfect subjunctives would be classified as hortatory, §439b, denoting “unfulfilled oblgation in past time,” and/or as optative, §441, “… the pluperfect (denotes the wish) as unaccomplished in past time.”
At least, that’s how I read them, in line with my previous post, a little—but only a little—differently from Hylander. In form, of course, they’re identical to potential subjunctives (i.e. apodoses without protases, as Hylander), so this is arguably a distinction without a difference.
It seems to me that there is yet another example of the subjunctive in a independent clause if we can speak of a one-word clause: that is fuisset in line 603 that mwh quoted.
verum anceps pugnae fuerat fortuna. —fuisset:
What kind of subjunctive is it? Jussive? And how should it be translated? “Let it be so.”?
It’s a dense and complex passage, and this fuerat-fuisset switch is its most ostentatiously striking feature. Orberg understandably eliminates much of the complexity of the thought.
But to unpack the sequence:
-First we have the non-potui rhetorical questions, “Couldn’t I have …?”
-Then “verum anceps pugnae fuerat fortuna” acknowledges to herself that she couldn’t have been assured of success (“Oh, but it could have gone either way”). Here the indicative fuerat would ordinarily be the contrary-to-fact fuisset; the indicative is the more vivid form of expression (“it had been” instead of “it would have been”), well attested in prose as well as verse.
-Then the abrupt and stark fuisset marks another shift. I think you’re right to suggest “jussive,” but it’s a past jussive (if we can imagine such a thing), not “Let it be so” but “Let it have been so”—which leads on to her “quem metui moritura?", another rhetorical question, explaining her indifference to the consequences in her (hypothetical) attempt at murder, as if to say “What did I have to lose?”
(“Jussive,” “hortatory,” “optative,” all much of a muchness in Latin.)
-Then on to the vengeful actions she could/should have taken (faces in castra tulissem etc.), enlarging on the “non potui?” idea we started with, and culminating in her (imagined but soon to be realized) suicide, fulfilling moritura.
(-And then the awful curse. Read on!)