Cicero's In Caecilium: id quod cuivis probare deberent?

[Anonymous]

Hi,

Here's part of a sentence from Cicero:

"id quod cuivis probare deberent?"*

which the notes in my Reader translate as:

'what ought to seem reasonable to everyone', literally, 'that for which they ought to win approval from anyone'.

I can't quite see how the English translation is arrived at from that latin.

I see it as 'they ought to approve', and I can't see where I'm going wrong. Also, is 'cuivis' a dative or a genitive of quivis?

Thanks for any help.

*the full clause is :"nonne id dicerent quod cuivis probare deberent?"

 

[Cato]

Probare - "to approve" with the dative cuivis - "anyone" can mean "to judge/evaluate (someone)". So the sentence literally is "Surely they would have said that which they ought (to say) to judge anyone."

Cicero's point, I think, is that "they" would have said X (either assumed or in testimony; since the imperfect subjunctive is used here I'm betting it's a contrary-to-fact supposition), and that X is the kind of thing they ought to have said to anyone they were planning to judge/evaluate, i.e. the testimony/supposition is reasonable. This is how your reader got to the translation it gives.[/i]

 

[Anonymous]

Thanks! I understand the form of the sentence a bit better now.

But there's still something I'm missing: I still can't grasp how the literal meaning:

" which they ought (to say) to judge anyone."

becomes the idiomatic translation of

" what ought to seem reasonable to anyone ".

In the literal sentence they seem to be doing the judging, in the idiomatic one they are doing something judged as reasonable.

What am I not getting here?

 

[Cato]

From what you say, I do not believe the reader is giving you a literal translation. I think they're taking the idea behind debeo - "ought" and stretching it a bit. If it is something they ought to do, then the action being done is reasonable.

I checked the full text; it's from the Oration against Caecilius (I'm not very familiar with this work, so am translating out of context):

Si tibi, Q. Caecili, hoc Siculi dicerent: 'te non novimus, nescimus qui sis, numquam te antea vidimus; sine nos per eum nostras fortunas defendere cuius fides est nobis cognita,' nonne id dicerent quod cuivis probare deberent?

"If the Sicilians were to say to you, Quintus Caecilius, "We haven't gotten to know you, we haven't known what kind (of person) you may be, we have never seen you before; allow us to defend our fortunes at the hands of (per) him whose faith is known to us,' surely they would be saying something which they ought to judge anyone."

The imperfect sub. is clear now; this is a contrary-to-fact conditional. Cicero is characterizing the Sicilian's attitude as reasonable because it's something you would say in judging anyone (I know I wouldn't just hand my gold over to some unknown Roman prefect)

 

[Anonymous]

Thanks very much for your help.

I find trying to understand the literal sense helps me get a proper grasp of how the Latin grammar works. But it's still very occasionaly difficult to grasp the meaning, and so translate it to English idiom, even after I think I've understood how it does work.

Anyway, thanks again.