Today I ran across this sentence while reading a biography of Vergil in my textbook. Here it is along with my translation:
Publius Vergilius Maro, maximus poetarum Romanorum, natus est Idibus Octobribus prope Mantuam, quod est oppidum Italiae septentrionalis. Vergil, the greatest of the Roman poets, was born on the 15th of October near Mantua, which is a town in northern Italy.
Why is quod used instead of quae in the relative clause? Isn’t its antecedent Mantuam? If so, shouldn’t the relative pronoun be feminine nominative singular?
I think you’re right, Deccius (awesome avatar, by the way! yeh, yeh, yeh! well you should see Polythene Pam!). If “quod” doesn’t mean “because” (also a memorable theme), it just seems like an improper usage here, certainly in Classical terms. It should be “quae.”
oh my, is not the attraction of the relative one of the most prevalent entries in the grammar books? (Mantuam is of course the antecedent but the relative pronoun is attracted into the gender of its complement). Benissimus, my good man?
Lucus raises a good point with his important conditional ‘if “quod” doesn’t mean “because”’. and there we all were thinking we had a causal link between the location of Mantua and where Virgil was born.
Precisely. Though it is easy to react to what another says (such as Iâ€:trade_mark:m doing now ), it requires much more risk and courage to say something meaningful oneself, which nearly always leaves one open to the attacks of others.
Wow. I’ve never heard of this attraction in Latin, and I’ve been studying it for 5 years. But it appears to be true, checking A&G:
“A relative generally agrees in gender and number whith an appostitive or predicate noun in its own clause, rather than with an antecedent of different gender or number” (sec. 306)
), it requires much more risk and courage to say something meaningful oneself, which nearly always leaves one open to the attacks of others.