Bitmap dixit:
But with the above in mind, it should be talem esse rather than talis esse in his first suggestion
Really?? Unless you’re wrong, this is a revelation to me.
My understanding (perhaps faulty) was that this terminology of ‘accusative and infinitive’ came about purely because such sentences happen to end up with an accusative in them since they tend to be the object of another transitive verb, but that there was absolutely no actual need for the subject to be in the accusative (which is not the appropriate case for a subject if it can be avoided).
Now, in English we do certainly use an accusative for such subjects even when they are not simultaneously objects. For example, we say ‘
him being there is vital’. I see this rather intrusive and apparently ungrammatical accusative as the product of an analogy with sentences such as ‘
it is vital for him to be there’ or ‘
I’m comforted by him being there’ or ‘
I hate him being there’, in which the accusative is clearly justified by what precedes.
Again, my (perhaps faulty) understanding was that Latin was stricter than this, and only used accusatives for those subjects which were, at the same time, objects.
I feel somewhat vindicated in this belief by the first verses of Ovid’s
Amores, where it essentially says
dicitur Cupido risisse. Now, if we expressed it as ‘they say that Cupid laughed’, it would be
dicunt Cupidinem risisse, with an accusative quite rightly used because Cupid being the object of
dicunt trumps the fact that he’s the subject of
risisse. But the passive verb does not require an accusative for its pseudo-object, and
infinitives don’t require an accusative for their subjects; therefore, a nominative is used.
I would therefore expect
esse talis qualis es and
esse is qui es with the customary nominatives for copular verbs, and not with accusatives, which lead me to search the sentence in vain for some transitive verb.
