quam pingui macer est mihi taurus in arvo

[Maroseika]

Hello,

From the Virgil's "Bucolics":

Heu mihi, quam pingui macer est mihi taurus in arvo!

Why "pingui" is not right before "field" and how one can guess it refers to arvo?

 

[Scholiast]

saluete, Maroseika et conlegae omnes

Several possible or even likely answers are to hand.

First, from its declension-pattern, pingui can only be a dative or ablative singular. In this sentence, the only (dative or) ablative noun for it to agree with is arvo. (And please note that macer is also separated from its noun, taurus, though not so distantly: this is very common in Latin, especially Latin verse). No 'guesswork' is required.

Secondly, pingui arvo involves a hiatus by ramming two adjacent vowels together. This is repugnant to a Latin ear, and it would entail the ugly elision of two long syllables, pingu- arvo. arvo pingui would also be possible, but this would call for a complete reformulation of the sentence.

Thirdly, the metrical rules governing the construction of lines in hexameter verse are strict, not to say stringent, with regard to the arrangement of 'long' and 'short' syllables. Doubtless Virgil (genius as he was) could have formulated the line in other ways, with the same sense, but he chose not to, chiefly for my fourth reason:

Fourthly—and to my mind decisively—the dominant thought in this line is the contrast between the green and rich fertility of the pasture on one hand, and the scrawny thinness of the ox on the other. Virgil's line brings this out very effectively by juxtaposing the two adjectives, Heu mihi, quam pingui macer est mihi taurus in arvo.

Other contributors may have more to add.

Σ

 

[Maroseika]

Thank you very much, Scholiast.
I came across this line in the Fuller's "The Hole State", where he put it into the catren:

My starveling bull,
Ah woe is me,
In pasture full,
How lean is he?

 

[Scholiast]

Thank you very much, Scholiast.
I came across this line in the Fuller's "The Hole State", where he put it into the catren:

My starveling bull,
Ah woe is me,
In pasture full,
How lean is he?

Interesting: not a work, or a poet, with whom/which I am familiar. But as you imply, this quatrain is indeed a more or less exact translation of Virgil.

Glad of course that you found my observations helpful.😊

Σ

 

[Maroseika]

Thank you for the correction (quatrain).
By the way, don't you know why in some sources it's not arvo, but ervo (vetch)?

 

[Bertelli]

By the way, don't you know why in some sources it's not arvo, but ervo (vetch)?

I, for my part, don't, but most certainly whether arvo and ervo are variants in the manuscript tradition, or arvo, which indeed seems to make a whole lot more of sense, is a conjectural correction dismissing ervo as a scribal misreading.

Scholiast's fourth and main reason, quite well explained by him, is further magnified by the virtuosic placement of the adverb quam, which creates an impressive ambiguity: while the easier, and of course correct, reading of the verse is "Oh alas! how skinny is my bull in a fertile land!", the word order, by placing pingui next to quam, suggests the syntactic link between them and thus plays with the focusing on pingui arvo: "Oh alas! my bull is skinny in how fertile a land!", or "Oh alas! I have a skinny bull in how fertile a land!" ("est mihi" = "I have") — and all the more so because the caesura falls after pingui, helping to throw quam and pingui together even more tighly —, in such a way that the two contrasting focuses (or, since the bull is an extention and image of the shepherd, the subjective and the objective focus) crisscross with one another. Quite a magnificent verse.

 

[Maroseika]

Thank you very much.

 

[Scholiast]

A propos Maroseika's question in # 5: in the mediaeval manuscripts on which we depend for our knowledge of the Greek and Latin classics, it is quite easy for lower-case 'a' and 'e' to be confused. But from the sense of the whole line and context, I cannot see how 'vetch' would be preferable to 'field' or 'pasture' or 'meadow'.

Σ

 

[Maroseika]

A propos Maroseika's question in # 5: in the mediaeval manuscripts on which we depend for our knowledge of the Greek and Latin classics, it is quite easy for lower-case 'a' and 'e' to be confused. But from the sense of the whole line and context, I cannot see how 'vetch' would be preferable to 'field' or 'pasture' or 'meadow'.

Σ

Maybe because vetch is more nourishing than ordinary pasture, which might underline the leanness of the bull (in spite of being among so nutricious feed)?

 

[bearded]

In this sentence, the only (dative or) ablative noun for it to agree with is arvo.

Hello
I know it's not very plausible, but do you absolutely exclude that 'pingui' may agree with 'mihi' and not with 'arvo'?
How lean appears a bull on the meadow to me, a fat/well-nourished man! (sorry for the poor English construction).

 

[Maroseika]

It doesn't seem to be in line with the context:

Heu heu! quam pingui macer est mihi taurus in ervo!
Idem amor exitium pecori pecorisque magistro.

 

[Scholiast]

saluete amici

Here I agree wholly with Mr Maroseika (# 11—except in his reading ervo rather than arvo). mihi I construe as a possessive dative, and the traiectio verborum with pingui anticipating arvo, and the whole phrase enclosing macer...taurus, is a typically Virgilian example of skilful word-painting.

Σ

 

[S.V.]

In a 'rustic' context, given its use for 'fattened' animals (pingue pecus domino facias): My lanky ox, how stout and portly he looks to me. This love will be the end of the beast, and its master. That is the only alternative I could think of.

Purely on syntax, I do not know if ɴᴏᴍ est ᴅᴀᴛ ᴅᴀᴛ (cf. Dahl 2014) would be common without nouns. You see volenti mihi est as a "clear Graecism" in New Perspectives on Historical Latin Syntax I, p. 104 (2.1.3.5).

Pinguis is consistently 'positive' (laetam et pinguem fortunam, "a rich and happy fortune"), so amor would exist in seeing a scrawny beast as 'corpulent, plump'. Amor before exitium, once the beast is eaten and the field is left unploughed.

mihi I construe as a possessive dative

It also had reflects in Romance, for ex. in Romanian or French: capul îi este frumos < *capus illi est furmosus (p. 495, cf. Balkan syncretism), ce livre est à moi.4 For the alternative here, one would claim it has 'both' functions, as in Italian or Spanish examples.