Ne quis miretur qui sim, paucis eloquar

[cinefactus]

The first line of the Aulularia

Why is it qui sim and not quis sim?

 

[Godmy]

My take on it is that you have to imagine that this is a theater play and some actor XYZ whom the audience has probably known for a long time from N amount of other roles is coming again, but he's saying that this time from "this set of possible persons/characters, I'm this one", I think it's both the actor and the portrayed character speaking at that time.

 

[Godmy]

I mean, in the prologues, the characters ostensibly break the illusion with the "we're aware of the audience and sometimes we address you" quite often.

 

[Godmy]

Alright, after doing some corpus search, Cinefactus, I found out that the reported question "quis sim" is very rare (a few times in classics, never in Plautus or Terence), but what's more: not just Plautus and Terence ask indirectly "qui sim" with a hinted sense of "quis sim", but even classical authors, Cicero too, ask this way and it truly seems as though they mean "quis sim".

So, it may be that in the reported question "quis" simply has this phrasal variant...

It's also possible that if one read all the huge definitions of "quis" or "qui" in OLD, they would find something along these lines right away, but, alas, I've been too lazy to do that yet

 

[cinefactus]

Thanks Godmy. That is interesting

 

[AoM]

On this line from the Aeneid (qui sit fari, quo sanguine cretus, / hortamur), Horsfall says "before s, qui is standard.."

Though I don't know how wide-ranging that claim is supposed to be.

I think this was somewhere else in the Aeneid as well, but I can't remember where.

 

[Dantius]

from Livy "qui sis, non unde natus sis reputa."

The qui can sometimes also have the connotation (as here) of "what type of person", not just "what person" (quis), though I don't quite see that in the Plautus passage.