Teucrum comitantibus armīs

[ClassicalSoul]

I want to confirm that this is an accuarte reading of the plural genitive and ablative absolute.

Teucrum comitantibus armīs
Pūnica sē quantīs attollet glōria rēbus!

Being (ac)companied of the Trojans and armed,
With how many things will Carthage touch glory!

 

[Pacifica]

That's not it.

Comitantibus agrees with armis, and Teucrum modifies armis. Literally "with the Trojans' arms (in the sense of weapons, of course) accompanying". If you want a smoother translation, you may turn this into "accompanied by the arms of the Trojans".

Punica is an adjective in agreement with gloria, which is nominative and not accusative.

Quantis means "how great", not "how many".

 

[Bitmap]

No.

Teucrum is a genitive referring to armis. Does the English expression "accompanied of the Trojans" even make sense to you as (I presume) an English speaker?

Gloria is not the accusative object. Mainly because it's not in the accusative.

 

[Pacifica]

Does the English expression "accompanied of the Trojans" even make sense to you as (I presume) an English speaker?

It makes sense archaically. A few centuries ago, "of" was used like "by" before agents of passive verbs.

 

[Pacifica]

And, if anyone cares to know, in Old English it was "from" that was usually used that way, just like Latin ab. I think, though, that "of" could already occur in that sense, but I'd need to check that.

 

[David Fields]

So, as a new learner, to the OP:

With the Trojans, glorious Carthage will accomplish great deeds.

(Taking that the Trojans will be armed is a given. Both the more literal "armed Trojans" or "Trojan arms" sound odd to me--archaic. "Weaponized Trojans" sounds to me anachronistic, Gulf War-ish. And I assume, knowing the passage, it does not literally mean Carthage is going to strip the Trojans of their military equipment. And that verbs with "to bear" and the noun of "things" can have a wide variety of meanings)

Aeneid, book 4, lines 48-49. A hopeful beginning sentiment to the book. A hope which is tragically misplaced.

 

[Gregorius Textor]

Pūnica sē quantīs attollet glōria rēbus!

But isn't Pūnica an adjective, and glōria a noun?
I'm reading this as

With what great things the Punic glory will lift itself up!

It sounds a little awkward, though.

 

[Pacifica]

But isn't Pūnica an adjective, and glōria a noun?

Yes, as I said:

Punica is an adjective in agreement with gloria

Well, I didn't explicitly state that gloria was a noun, but I didn't think it necessary since it seemed easily inferrable and even the OP had translated that word correctly as "glory" in the first place.

With what great things the Punic glory will lift itself up!

It sounds a little awkward, though.

It is a correct literal translation. For something less awkward, I'm sure you could rephrase it a hundred ways. Maybe something like "through what great deeds will Punic glory rise!"

 

[Pacifica]

Now I'm a bit unsure, because it also seems possible to take quantis rebus as dative ("to what great things"). You'd usually find ad + acc. for this meaning of "to" in prose, but the dative is possible in poetry.

 

[David Fields]

With the Trojans, Carthaginian glory will accomplish great deeds. (I like the active "glory")

Usually, I translate more literally --because I want to be in the Roman head, or, when I am reading Le Monde, the French. In essence, I don't want to translate, but to read in another language.

I was --stunned-- somewhere [go ahead show me where!], when I read Latin poetry about a women and a man being like an elm and a wine vine. And finding out that the Roman vineyards, I think, grew their vines curling up and between trees, and this was a pattern up to 19 century middle Italy. "Vineyard" became different in my understanding.

And "Equus" is a horse--but, let me think, and maybe research, what a Roman horse was, where, and when. "Horse" is not, in this case, at all, an American Thoroughbred.

So there must be oodles of books about the spectrum of translating: from word for word to current idiom (my favorite class, long ago, at the University of Virginia, was an English class where we had to do that writing transition)