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The Case-construction After the Comparative in Pliny's Letters
The Caseconstruction After the Comparative in Pliny's Letters Author:Gifford Foster Clark Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: Hence we may conclude that the subjunctive in Pliny does not cause the employment of quam after the comparative. Here Neville places a usage peculiar to Publi... more »lius Syrus in Republican Literature, in which an infinitive stands as the real subject of the verb and a comparative adjective is the predicate modifier of the infinitive. The comparative is followed by quam and a noun in the nominative. The following (Neville, p. 38) is a citation from Publilius Syrus, showing the type of construction: 501: plus est quam poena iniuriae succumbere. There is but one example in Pliny at all comparable to this, and that is open to a double interpretation. The whole sentence is quoted for the sake of clearness. Ill, 16, 6: sed tamen ista facienti, ista dicenti gloria et aeternitas ante oculos erant; quo maius est sine praemio aeternitatis, sine praemio gloriae abdere lacrimas, operire luctum, amissoque filio matrem adhuc agere. Here, if quo is taken as a relative pronoun having as its antecedent facer e and dicere, inferred from ista facienti and ista dicenti in the first part of the sentence, we have a similar usage except that the ablative is found after the comparative in place of quam. (See Category XV.) If, on the other hand, we regard quo as an ablative of degree of difference, Pliny then shows no parallel to the usage of Publilius Syrus. XIII. The genitive of price in Republican Literature when expressed by a comparative is followed, with but one exception, by the quam construction. Pliny has but one instance where both terms of the comparison are expressed, and quam is used. VIII, 2, 4: qui pluris quam decem milibus emerant. (See Category XXI, Plus, B.) This example is not exactly comparable to those cited by Neville, as the second member does not express something whose va...« less