Good evening everybody, I’m back to ask for your help again.
I was today working through the exercises on uses of the dative in the Scottish Classics Group’s The Latin Language: A Handbook for Students, and found myself a little shaky on the following two sentences, from Exs. A and B on p.12 respectively:
8 ) ei quibus res urbanae non iam placent ruri vitam laeti agunt.
?Those not already pleased by urban affairs, [are] happy to pass their life in the country.
nonne magnae laudi erat Ciceroni illam orationem habuisse?
Surely Cicero possessed great praise to have held that oration? i.e. Surely Cicero was greatly praised for his oration?
The former, I am reasonably happy with, but would like it if somebody let me know how close they think I am to the mark. The latter I find more troubling, and know that something obvious explains the use of the perfect infin. act. here, but I am not seeing it. I know that nonne introduces a question loaded toward the answer ‘yes’, and am reasonably confident in asserting that ‘magnae laudi erat Ciceroni’ is a dative of possession. But it just won’t click for some reason.
Many thanks for any help, as ever it is greatly appreciated.
Surely (lit. To have held) holding that oration was a great honour for Cicero?
Is this right? Can habeo be used for in Latin to express this sense of ‘holding’ in English? So is habuisse a gerund here? How do you work out that habuisse is the subject - is the use of an infinitive in this way common with the double dative?
Habuisse is a perfect infinitive so it can’t be a gerund. As has been pointed out this is a double dative construction with erat as copulative.
OLD 20. b for habeo is to make (a speech)… . illam orationem is accusative direct object of habuisse.
Ciceroni is a dative of reference (the person in whose eyes the statement of the predicate holds good - Glidersleeve).
Magnae laudi is a dative of purpose or result - the result in this case of C. giving a speech.
Erat is copulative.
You need to look through your text to revise these datives and see if you can make sense of it. Analyse the grammar dont try to fit the Latin to what you think it means in English.
You should ask yourself who gave the speech and who received praise as a result of that?
Thank you for taking the time to reply. Ah - I had misremembered what I had read in James Morwood’s Latin Grammar - he says that in the nominative, the gerund is represented by the present infinitive. I had misremembered and thought that a verbal noun (gerund) in the nominative could be represented by any tense of the infinitive - so I thought that habuisse could here be the nominative ‘to have held’, or in English we might say ‘holding’, with the auxiliary ‘was’ (here erat) to indicate past time.
I have looked at the sentence again, but still come up with (slightly better for your OLD def. of habeo with an oration, and having found that laudi esse often means a credit to - which better fits laus’ meaning ‘praise’):
Surely to have given that speech was a great credit to/for Cicero?
But I fail to see how this is hugely different from what I had:
Surely (lit. To have held) holding that oration was a great honour for Cicero?
I don’t see that I am continuing to bend the grammar to what I believe the English says. Analysing the grammar I see:
Nonne…? - Surely (introducing a loaded direct question) magnae laudi erat - was (for the purpose of) a great credit (The first dative of a double dative indicating purpose/service with the verb esse - see Moreland & Fleischer p.131) Ciceroni - (with reference) to Cicero (second dative of a double dative - dative of reference) illam orationem - that oration/speech (accusative direct object of the perfect infinitive active verb habuisse) habuisse - to have held/with oratio, given (verb in perfect infinitive active)
Surely to have given that speech was (for the purpose of) a great credit (with reference) to Cicero?
Please let me know where I am still going wrong.
Thank you all again - it really helps when you don’t have a teacher anymore.
Well, translating a perfect infinitive with a perfect infinitive is more exact, but in colloquial English no one uses perfect infinitives anyway so IMO a gerund would be just fine for a translation.
edit: I think you are right. Your version looks good to me.
I just wanted you to think about the grammar a bit more than you had in your first post. I was offering a general hint that its only when you have worked out the Latin Grammar that you can think about a translation. How a sentence works in Latin is an entirely different matter to how it would be expressed English. If you have analysed the grammar correctly which I think you now have then you can express the idea in English. In your first post you came up with a more or less correct translation but for for the wrong reasons. Concentrating on a translation rather than an explanation of the grammar seems to me a back to front way of doing things.
I think praise is fine for laus. Didn’t Cicero receive much praise for delivering that speech? Perhaps dative of purpose is not the best description its also called dative of result and other things too. The sense is that the result of the speech was that Cicero got praise for delivering it.
I was trying to be encouraging but maybe I need to try harder. Well done.
No, you are right and this is entirely fair - I certainly did not intend to seem snide or catty in my response! (Tone via text message can be a difficult thing to interpret - for a foul-mouthed illustration, see https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=naleynXS7yo !)
Importantly you did encourage me to look again - to double check. This gave me confidence in my analysis; I had just interpreted your last comment as meaning that I was still some way off a correct analysis/understanding of the sense, and I just could not make it work any other way. Thus I asked again for help.
Please don’t worry, I have not been discouraged, and I really appreciate that you took the time to help me.
Thank you all for all your help in getting me here.