# Parva and Vepera - the Position of the Modifier



## 810senior

Hello.
Could you give me a clue if the word order of this Latin sentence makes sense?
If I'm not mistaken it would mean "a small viper kills a big ox by poison", but its word order appears to be confusing because there's a too big gap between a modified word(vepera) and an adjective(parva) modifying it.



> _Parva necat viro spatiosum vepera taurum._
> (quoted from a textbook written in Japanese)



Thanks.


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## Scholiast

salvete 810senior necnon alii amici!

_parva necat viro spatiosum vipera taurum _is perfectly good Latin. The adjective _parva_ is indeed separated from the noun _vipera_, and _spatiosum_ from _taurum_, but this phenomenon (known technically as _traiectio verborum_) is very readily possible in Latin because the inflexional "agreement" (or "congruence") of number, gender and case makes it unambiguous to which noun the attribute is attached.

It is particularly common in Latin verse, where the author is not only trying to manufacture sense, but must also obey the constraints of the metre (i.e. the rhythm). This is a good example, as the sentence is in fact a perfect hexameter. The best Latin poets - such as Horace, Virgil and Ovid - can create some startlingly good sound-and-sense effects by this device, sometimes not merely within a line, but across two or three lines or even more.

Σ


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## 810senior

Thanks for the quickest reply, Scholiast! It's quite interesting.


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## fdb

​It is a slightly altered quotation from Ovid’s Remedia amoris, lines 421-2. The original form is this elegiac couplet:

Parva necat morsu spatiosum vipera taurum:
  A cane non magno saepe tenetur aper.


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## Scholiast

Thanks fdb - silly me, I ought to have recognised it. To my previous post here I might have added that the retention of the subject _vipera_, expected once we have had the nominative adjective _parva_ at the head of the line, until the fifth foot, and sandwiched between _spatiosum...taurum_, is cleverly suggestive (and Ovid was nothing if not clever, _n'est-ce pas_?) of the "snake in the grass", lurking unseen and insidious beneath the ox's feet, but deadly.

Σ


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## fdb

I agree. But I am baffled by the fact that the Japanese textbook found it necessary to "improve" on Ovid.


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## Scholiast

salvete de novo!



fdb said:


> I am baffled by the fact that the Japanese textbook found it necessary to "improve" on Ovid.



Perhaps because _morsus_ is a 4th-declension noun, and at that stage of the course students are not expected to have met it?

Σ


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## Flaminius

Just in case the OP is wondering, _morsu_, "by a bite", consists of two "poetically long" syllables just like _viro_ does.  Long vowels (as in vī.rō) make long syllables, naturally.  In Latin poetry, a syllable is also long if its vowel is followed by more than one consonants (e.g., morsū).


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