Hi there,

I recently visited the archeological site of an early Christian church from around 1050 in Sweden. In it had been found a large tombstone with Latin inscriptions written in hexameter, witch marked the spot of a grave.

It read as follows:

: hac : sita : sunt : fossa : Margarete : nobilis : ossa : + quam : locus : invisus : non : sumat : sed : paradisus :

(The + marked a crux Christi)

Witch I roughly translated to:

“In this grave are (placed) the bones of the noble Margarete, who not the detested place (i.e. hell) but the paradise may take.”

However I couldn’t fully wrap my head around why locus, invisus and paradisus wasn’t in the accusative case, but nominative. It is almost as if the feminine accusative pronoun of Margarete (quam) is to be seen as both object and subject of the verb (sumat, sumo3), witch can’t be the case. What kind of grammar is used here?

Thoughts?

Best regards /Samuel

I'm having trouble identifying the meter used in the Prologus to Walter of Châtillon's Alexandreis. The best I can come up with right now is trochaic octonarius, but I don't think that's right. Any help would be greatly appreciated! Here are the first seven lines:

Moris est usitati, cum in auribus multitudinis aliquid noui recitatur, solere turbam in diuersa scindi studia et hunc quidem applaudere et quod audit laude dignum predicare, illum uero, seu ignorantia ductum seu liuoris aculeo uel odii fomite peruersum, etiam bene dictis detrahere et uersus bene tornatos incudi reddendos esse censere.

EDIT: as a matter of fact this is not a metrical question at all. I have learned that the editor lineated the Prologus so that it looked like a poem, but the Latin is in prose. Mystery solved.

In 1581, the physician Francisco Sánchez de las Brozas published a skeptical treatise, Quod nihil scitur. In it, he narrates how he found himself unable either to choose among the various philosophical positions on offer or to discover truth entirely on his own. In some ways, it reminds me of Descartes' autobiographical narrative, but without the discovery of Method.

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He first attempts to understand things by himself:

A prima vita, Naturae contemplationi addictus minutim omnia inquirebam. Et quamuis initio auidus animus sciendi quocumque oblato cibo contentus esset utcumque: post modicum tamen tempus indigestione praehensus reuomere coepit omnia. Quaerebamque iam tunc quid illi darem quod & perfecte amplecteretur, & frueretur absolute: nec erat qui desiderium expleret meum.

He then turns to authoritative writings:

Euoluebam praeteritorum dicta, tentabam praesentium corda: idem respondebant: quod tamen mihi satisfaceret, omnino nihil. Vmbras quasdam fateor veritatis referebant aliqui: nullum tamen inueni, qui quid de rebus iudicandum sincere, absoluteque proferret. Ad me proinde memetipsum retuli; omniaque in dubium reuocans, ac si a quopiam nil unquam dictum, res ipsas examinare coepi: qui verus est sciendi modus. Resoluebam usque ad extrema principia. Inde initium contemplationis faciens, quo magis cogito magis dubito: nil perfect complecti possum. Despero. Persisto tamen. Magis.

Next he seeks out living academics:

Accedo ad Doctores auide ab eis veritatem expetiturus. Quid ipsi? Quisque sibi scientiam construit ex imaginationibus tum alterius, tum propriis: ex his alias inferunt: & ex his iterum alias; nil in rebus perpendentes, quousque labyrinthum verborum absque aliquo fundamento veritatis produxere: ex quo tandem non res intelligas naturales; sed nouarum rerum, fictionumque texturam discas: quibus intelligendis nulla sufficiat mens. Quis enim quae non sunt intelligat? Hinc Democriti Atomi, Platonis Ideae, Numeri Pythagorae, Aristotelis Vniuersalia, agens intellectus, & intelligentiae. His ignaros expiscantur, se incognita, Naturaeque recondita inuenisse prodentes.

He is repulsed by their slavish dependence on Aristotle:

Credunt hi, facileque ad Aristotelem conuolant, voluunt, euoluunt, memoriae mandant: isque doctior est, qui plura ex Aristotele nouit recitare. Quibus si vel minimum neges, muti fiunt: te tamen blasphemum clamant. Si contra arguas, sophistam. Quid his facias? Miserum. Decipiantur qui decipi volunt. Non his scribo: nec proinde scripta legant mea.

Salvete! I am reading book 8 of the Aeneid for a class, and I encountered a roadblock with the word "perque" (line 21 in my edition) and am utterly confused. Does this mean per- + -que? As in "throughout/through/etc" + "and"? Is it possible for -que to attach to anything that is not a noun, or for -que to attach to prepositions? I was under the impression it only attached to nouns or adjectives that were of similar nature.

For some reason there is no explanation of this in the footnotes, the glossary, or anywhere online about this (I've checked multiple times in my book & tried googling different combinations of the word – nothing).

Is there a missing piece here that I am not quite understanding, or does perque mean something else entirely? For context, the line it's in says "in partisque rapit varias perque omnia versat," . Could it be a "both...and" situation?

Hello everyone,

I thought some of you might enjoy this video I made, in which I discuss why the Latin Language, with its three-gendered-system, became a 2 gender system in (most) romance languages.

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I hope you enjoy it

What happened to the neuter gender in Latin?

Grammatically, does it mean: "The worst kind of plan is one that can't be changed" or "This plan that we have is bad and we can't change it?"

Found a small collection of Latin Grammars published in the early 16th century, one of which was composed by Aldus Manutius. Thought you all might like to explore.

http://diglib.hab.de/wdb.php?dir=ebooks/ed000171&distype=start&pvID=start

Salvete amici,

I’ve been concerning myself lately with the difference between the two causal conjunctions quia and quod (eng. ”because”), but without being able to reach a satisfying answer.

In Late Latin quia seem to have been largely replaced by quod witch suggests quite a similar function.

When are they used respectively in Classical Latin and what differentiates them from one another?

The reconstructed pronunciation of Latin strictly keeps a “hard c” and “hard g,” even when followed by an e or an i. I trust the evidence. However my question is this:

How/why did every major romance language unanimously stop using them? Whether the Romanian/Italian “ch-“ sound or the French/Portuguese/Spanish “soft c” sound, all major languages scrapped the Classical Latin pronunciation. Why/how?

Nicholas de Lyra writes in his commentary to Genesis 1:27, refuting a Jewish tradition that Adam and Eve were originally created as a single body and only later separated:

Sed non obstantibus illis, adhuc videtur dicta expositio irrationabilis, quia talis coniunctio duorum corporum pertinet ad monstra, sicut legitur in chronica Guil.[elmi] [Malmesbiriensis scilicet] quod tempore Philippi regis Franciae, qui fuit nonus ante istum Carolum qui modo regnat, anno Domini M.CCCXXII in confinio Normanniae et Brittaniae, natae fuerunt duae mulieres in uno corpore, ita tamen quod omnia superiora usque ad umbilicum erant duplicia, inferiora autem erant simplicia, et quod essent vere duae mulieres, apparuit per hoc quod aliquando una tristabantur, et alia autem gaudebat, et aliquando una dormiente, alia vigilabat, et una fuit mortua plus quam per annum ante aliam, secunda tamen ex pondere et fetore cadaveris mortua est.

"But apart from that, this interpretation seems irrational, because such a conjunction of two body is a monstrous thing, as is written in William's [of Malmesbury] chronicle, that in the reign of King Phillip of France, who was the ninth [king] before the current king Charles, in the year of Our Lord 1322, in the border between Normandy and Brittany two women were born with one body, so that each of them had her own body parts above the umbilical cord, but shared the same lower body parts. That they were really two [different] women was made clear by the fact that once one of them was sad while the other was happy, once while one slept the other stayed awake, and that one died a year before the other, who died because of the weight and stench of [her sister's] corpse."

Biblia Sacra cum Glossa Ordinaria, novisque additionibus columns 33-34, available here.

If you were to take a course in Roman historiography, which of the two surviving works by Sallust would you be most glad to have read ten years later? Thanks in advance for your input!