Hello,
I found a sentence the construction of which I don’t quite understand:
Itaque prīmum prae timōre nec stāre ausus nec prōgredī ; circumspectāre omnia et vel minimō strepitū expavēscere.
The tense used here is the historic infinitive, but the ausus part isn’t clear. Given the general construction, shouldn’t it be nec stāre audēre nec prōgredī or something?
Thanks!
Won’t ausus just be the participle? “Daring neither to stand still nor to move forward, he gazed around at everything” (like SInon in Aeneid 2). Or is it ausus (est), as the semicolon after progredi would suggest? Does the English help?
It looks like it is, but is this construction correct in that context? It’s the fact that ausus and prōgredī don’t use the same grammatical form that bothers me. I’d expect two infinitives or two participles.
I don’t think that should bother you. It’s only the semicolon (rather than a comma) that stands in the way of taking ausus as a participle. If the semicolon is right we must understand est with ausus, with the historical infinitives beginning at that point. Nothing wrong with that either.
Either way we have two pairs of infinitives, first nec stare nec progredi dep. on ausus (or ausus est) then circumspectāre omnia et expavēscere as hist.infins. (imperfective). I don’t know how it continues.
I’ve just had the enlightment thanks to you!!
We have only two historical infinitives: circumspectāre et expavēscere.
The first part could be rewritten as follows: nec stāre nec prōgredī ausus (est), now the sentence construction makes sense.
Yes. The word order in that first part is quite normal, exemplary even. ausus drops in after the first of its two dependent infinitives.