I’ve been struggling with these lines in Ovid’s Metamorphoses:
(11.723-725)
…iamque propinquae
admotum terrae, iam quod cognoscere posset,
cernit: erat coniunx!..
in particular “iam quod cognoscere posset, cernit”…
I understand the basic sense: as the corpse (of Ceyx) floats near enough, “so that now she would be able to recognize him, she distinguishes him” as her dead husband.
Is “quod” here acting like “ut” in a clause of result? Please could someone explain exactly what is the grammar of that phrase, specifically the usage of “quod” and the imperfect subjunctive “posset”?
No it’s nothing like a result clause. It’s just a relative clause. Consider:
cernit quod cognoscere potest: she sees what [i.e. that which] she’s able to recognize.
But cernit is a historic present. cernit quod cognoscere poterat: she saw what [i.e. that which] she was able to recognize.
But we have not plain poterat (impf.indic.) but posset, impf.subjunctive. Hence your question. It’s a so-called subjunctive of “characteristic”: she saw what (i.e. that which) she could recognize, something she could recognize.
In context it’s not too different from poterat or potuit, but the subjunctive makes a fun scene with its over-the-top pathos even funnier. erat coniunx! is the climax, before we revert to her reactions.
I trust you relished the wording of her initial sighting of the body. “prospicit: in liquida, spatio distante, tuetur | nescio quid quasi corpus, aqua. This is Ovid at his most delectable.
So, doesn’t the Sequence of Tenses operate in a relative clause of characteristic? So perhaps the fact that “cernit”, though present in form, is a historical present, as you said, and is thus really functioning as a past tense, would explain why “posset”, the imperfect subjunctive, is used? Or is there some idiosyncrasy of poetry that’s causing the SOT to be “violated”?
Yes, the telescoping viewpoint of Alcyone was a fun read!
Sure, it can be simply explained in terms of “sequence of tenses,” since cernit, as a “historic present,” syntactically behaves as if it were past tense (functionally aorist as distinct from perfect). The fact that this is verse makes no difference to that, and there’s no “violation” of anything. Ovid may violate all sorts of things—Augustan standards of decency, norms of sentence organization—, but his grammar is always impeccable.