Highly Nuanced Tense Question

[CORNELIVS XXXIV]

I think the hardest non-subjunctive aspect of Latin is the nuanced difference between the imperfect and perfect tenses.
Perhaps not everyone feels this way, but that is s how it has been for me as I have worked my way through Lingua Latina I.

At the end of each chapter in the book, there are a dozen-or-so questions which require responses in Latin.
One of the questions for Ch. 32 was (and I am going to omit macrons and brave Godmy's stake) – Cur Pompeius classi Romanae praepositus est?
I responded with: Quia Pompēius dux ēgregius fuit. (I actually wrote this with macrons so I am leaving them on here.)

Now I know this technically is not a complete sentence but that is not the point I wanted to make in this post.
I was pretty torn between using fuit or erat in my response, and the sample answers that I looked through afterwards were split on the two verbs.

Is either verb superior to the other in this case?

Thank you!
Cornelius

P. S.
These exercises are actually optional work in the class I am taking (i.e., they do not contribute to my grades) so all responses are fair game.

 

[Glabrigausapes]

An interesting question & a common frustration, particularly for us (?) native English speakers whose language does a fair deal of pussyfooting when it comes to the narrative past.

While the following comment is an extrapolation of the tense value in temporal clauses specifically, I think it's broad enough to hold true for general composition (from Woodcock's New Latin Syntax, p. 176):
'The imperfect tense denotes overlapping, and therefore contemporaneous rather than prior action. This is usually expressed by dum with the present indicative ..., and may account for the imperfect being rare with postquam, ubi, ut. Not even Livy uses it with simulac.'

And a good example (from Livy) he supplies is:
Ubi nemo obvius ibat, ad castra hostium *tendunt.
'When (as/seeing how/given that) no one was coming out to meet them, they *headed for the enemy camp.'

Now, implied in your sentence is the fact that Pompey continues to be good (even as they favor him = contemporaneous action), but not that he had been good beforehand (prior action), so as to warrant being favored. If he hadn't been good, they wouldn't have favored. (Now, don't start thinking about the pluperfect, both because it complicates things & because it doesn't really have to do with what we're talking about.) In other words, you made the right choice. Why did they appoint him? They appointed him because he was good (not because he was being good at the time of his appointment).

The sequence of events is:
He was good (fuit): they liked (placuit) his goodness: they appointed him (praeposuerunt).

*Narrative or 'historic' present = 'they headed for...'

 

[CORNELIVS XXXIV]

They appointed him because he was good (not because he was being good at the time of his appointment).

Yes, it is very frustrating! (I also am a native English speaker.)

But thank you for this explanation.
The part I quoted above kind of echoes something Pacifica said years ago in her exhaustive discourse on this issue:
THREAD: perfect-and-imperfect

Near the beginning she mentions something about using the perfect tense when considering an action as one complete "block".
In my example, Pompey was good, period – so fuit makes more sense.

It might be a little harsh to say that erat is dead wrong, but it certainly leaves the door open to unneeded questions like (as you implied) –
"Did he cease to be good afterwards?" and "Was he only good at the time of his appointment?" etc.