Still in the same scene with Apollo and Hyacinthus, where the one is going to turn the other into the flower hyacinth, and the description is:
flos oritur formamque capit quam lilia, si non
purpureus color his, argenteus esset in illis.
I guess I understand how this is supposed to work, after peeking at a translation after being confused for quite a while, trying to make this conform to any pattern I had learned previously, and I came up empty. It appeared to say (but this made no sense):
“a flower arises and takes the form which a lily (takes), if the color in these (the newly formed purple hyacinths) is/were not purple, (the color) would have-been/be silvery in those (lilies)”. But it’s supposed to mean, I gather
"…except (si non) the color in these IS purple, whereas in those it IS silver". I assume that I’m to recognize this construction from the “si non” in the protasis and the imperfect subjunctive “esset” in the apodosis, assuming those terms still even apply here in this new “condition”. I recognize that this should be fairly simple, but I don’t remember seeing this before. Could anyone please shed any light on this for me? Thanks!
Hmm. I read it like this: “and it takes the form that lilies (would take) if hyacinths were not purple and lilies were not silver.” Then there’s nothing out of the ordinary about the use of si non. The si non and the esset each apply to both halves of the if-clause (they have to be in parallel; they’re effectively saying the same thing, in Ovidian fashion). And it’s only when we hit esset that we might retrospectively switch from understanding capiunt in the apodosis (as we naturally do at first) to caperent, giving us a regular conditional.
Yes, thank you, Michael, it does help. I failed to fill in some of the parallelism that is present, but abbreviated:
capit quam lilia, si non [esset] purpureus color his, argenteus [si non] esset in illis.
So paraphrasing more verbosely, it’s like this: “these hyacinths here would look like lilies if they (the hyacinths) weren’t purple (but were silver instead), or if lilies weren’t silver (but were purple instead)”.
I guess I need to watch out more for parallel structures like this with parts of the parallelism artfully and deliberately deleted.
Yes, or more mundanely (and more in line with ancient analytical procedures)
flos oritur formamque capit quam lilia (sc. caperent) si non
purpureus color his, argenteus esset in illis.
si non introduces the pair of conditional clauses (their parallelism marked by the asyndeton and the foregrounded contrasting adjectives), in which color and esset are απο κοινοῦ.
The conceit seems rather frigid, but very Ovidian in its nature and its execution.
Each of them has syntactical and metrical salience, by virtue of their “fronted” placement both in the clause (once the initial si non is out of the way) and in the verse. So the color contrast is highlighted. It’s all very neat (slightly compromised by the preposition with illis, but that’s very minor).
