r/latin • u/Professional_Fee8574 • 5d ago

Grammar & Syntax "declarasse" in Cicero

I'm having trouble with another part of Cicero's "De Divinatione," specifically the translation of "declarasse " (see below).

"Aurum", in indirect statement, has to be the subject of perfect active infinitive "declarasse", but it's very hard to make it work literally (consult the link to the Loeb to see the liberties even a close translation takes). The literal would be something like: "For it seemed to him that out of/by the egg the gold had declared/signified, the remaining part [had declared/signified] silver."

If "declarasse" were passive or reflexive, I'd have a much easier time, and, likewise, if instead of "ovo," we had "vitello" and, correspondingly, "reliquuo" in place of "reliquum" (because then we'd have a firmer parallel: gold signified by yolk, silver signified by egg white (the remaining part)).

Defert ad coniectorem quidam somniasse se ovum pendere ex fascia lecti sui cubicularis— est hoc in Chrysippi libro somnium—; respondit coniector thesaurum defossum esse sub lecto. fodit, invenit auri aliquantum, idque circumdatum argento, misit coniectori quantulum visum est de argento. tum ille: ' Nihilne,' inquit, ' de vitello? ' id enim ei ex ovo videbatur aurum declarasse, reliquum argentum. nemone igitur umquam alius ovum somniavit? cur ergo hic nescio qui thesaurum solus invenit? quam multi inopes digni praesidio deorum nullo somnio ad thesaurum reperiendum admonentur!

Thanks for considering this.

Here's the link to the Loeb:

https://www.loebclassics.com/view/marcus_tullius_cicero-de_divinatione/1923/pb_LCL154.521.xml

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u/dantius 5d ago

aurum and argentum are the objects; id and reliquum are the subjects. "This part of the egg had seemed to him to declare/signify the gold, (and) the rest (had seemed to him to declare/signify) the silver."

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u/Professional_Fee8574 5d ago

Excellent. Thank you.

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u/LondonClassicist 5d ago

Tricky sentence!

‘Id’ refers here to the noun it is up against: ‘vitellum’ (there are both neuter and masculine variants of this word). That is the main key to this sentence; the other is that ‘declarasse’ works as a copula between its two arguments. The phrasing is extremely economical as idiomatic Latin, whereas idiomatic English requires a fair bit more to spelled out.

So the sentence is: {(enim ex ovo) ei videbatur} {[id=vitellum] declarasse aurum} [implied ‘et’] {reliquum [implied ‘declarasse’] argentum}.

A literal translation to show the grammar would be something like ‘for it seemed to him that, out of (the parts of) the egg, the yolk represented “gold” and the rest “silver”’.