I’ve been looking at this sentence ‘Dux exercitui imperat, exercitus duci suo paret.”.
I’ve been supplementing my studies with the ‘Companion’ and feel I’m getting to grips, with the use of the dative, with intransitive verbs. That is until I encountered the word ‘suo’. My understanding of the sentence would be, ‘the leader comands the army, the army is commanded by the leader’. I don’t feel confident that I’ve grasped the meaning as I don’t understand the use of the pronoun meaning ‘his’. His being singular. Whose?
To make it easier, let’s think of them as two separate sentences:
“Dux exercitui imperat.” - you got that part correct! The leader commands the army.
“Exercitus duci suo paret.” - Well, let me give you a hint. Here you have two words in the dative case because of the verb “paret” which needs a dative: “duci” and “suo”, which means that they are somehow connected. Like in this example, where they are in the accusative case: “Exercitus suum ducem videt.” - “The army sees its commander.”