Quid annona mordet

Pacifica

grammaticissima

  • Aedilis

Location:
Belgium
Hello everyone,

I realize that as I'm reading I'm having problems understanding some figurative expressions. This is the first one I post here, but it's likely not to be the last. For this one I've got my guess, but I thought it would be interesting anyway, to make a little collection of expressions here. As I suppose you've already guessed, this is from Petr. Satiricon; I've got two versions of the sentence:

Narrat is quod nec ad terram pertinet, cum interim nemo curat quid annona mordet.

Narratis quod nec ad caelum nec ad terram pertinet, cum interim nemo curat quid annona mordet.

So, I suppose that "what the market price bites" means "how high the market price is".
 

Cambrinus

Civis Illustris

  • Civis Illustris

Location:
Anglia
Allison's translation (c.1930) has 'the pinch of famine', but the 'pinch of hunger' is an expression which I have come across.
 
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