# 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?


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## 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


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## 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?


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## Scholiast

Maroseika said:


> 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


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## 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)?


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## Bertelli

Maroseika said:


> 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.


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## Maroseika

Thank you very much.


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## 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


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