What I missed at first in a few lines of Horace

Latin Learning Latin
1

Literary context: Horace is making some general comments about Latin poetry and poets

My self-instruction context: I want to show how this sentence might have been much easier for me, if only I had noticed the clues. I hope that by identifying the clues I missed I will in future be more likely to spot them. If error still clings to my account, others will pinpoint them. I’ll limit my comments to the first clause, the one that ends with the comma after Latium.
Art of Poetry, ll. 289-91.

nec virtute foret clarisve potentius armis
quam lingua Latium, si non offenderet unum
quemque poetarum limae labor et mora.

virtute: I got this ablative, but I missed the ablative plurals of clarisve … armis.

-ve enclitic ending of clarisve: I should have looked around for what this “or-word” points to, and I would more likely have noticed that clarisve . . .armis are ablative plural, an adjective-noun pair.

potentius: I failed to observe early enough that this is the nominative, neuter form of the comparative adjective. If I had only caught this one thing, the sentence would have been much easier, for Latium is also a neuter noun, and if I mistake not, the only nominative, neuter, singular noun in this clause.

lingua: If I had read metrically earlier, I would have seen that it has to be linguA, long-A ending, ablative singular. quam lingua would then have suggested a relationship with virtute.

With these clues noted, translation of the first clause is easier.

Latium would not have been more powerful in valor or glorious victory than in [its] language, …

2

These were all problems of parsing, as far as I understand. A hint is that, if you see a comparative, then most often than not you’re going to have ablatives doing their thing. I think the trickiest part in this might really be what you had the least problem with, namely linking Latium to potentius, since that could have been mistaken for an adverb.

3

Thanks anphph. I dithered for a while over what to do with potentius before the comparative adjective usage occured to me. Comparison of adjectives is one of my of grammatical weaknesses. Besides that the ablative-with-comparatives sometimes escapes my notice.

Being self-tutored, I lack those vivid memories of blunders committed as a student, with teacher correction, those feelings of relief when somebody else was called on, and stumbled over the difficulty. I spent my working life teaching, but this Latin avocation in retirement has made me more aware of the importance of teachers than I ever was while trying to practice their art.