Dear all, can you please help me to understand the grammatical construction of this sentence? (from Hyginius, Fabulae) Although I got the general meaning I’m striving to understand why is “audit” in the present tense? Shouldn’t it be pluperfect as “venerat”?
My understanding is that the main clause is “Theseus voluntarie pollicitus est”, “se ad Minotaurum ire” is an implicit objective infinitive clause and of course “postquam” introduces a temporal clause but: (i) is the temporal clause the coordination of both clauses “[…] venerat et audit [..] (with “quanta calamitate civitas afficeretur” an objective clause) or (ii) the temporal is just “a Troezene venerat”? (but what type of clause is “audit …”)?
Hi, I don’t know Hyginius’s Latin, however audit looks like a usage of the historical present used for a verb of perception in a temporal clause.
It’s clear that audit is a historical tense (and no-one in this thread disputes that), being followed by afficeretur in secondary sentence; if it was a true present it would be in primary sequence, but historical present can take either primary or secondary sequence: Woodcock s. 279(c).
For use of historical present with verbs of perception in temporal clauses, see e.g. Woodcock 217(3):
It’s actually the venerat verb which is more unusual; the aorist perfect would be more common, however the pluperfect can be used to stress the anteriority: Woodcock s. 217(2)(d):
I’m guessing Hyginius used the pluperfect rather than aorist perfect here to stress that, in the temporal clause itself, venerat happened before audit (historical present). Not super elegant.