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such cases suus can refer either to the subject of the clause it is in or, as
here, to the subject of the main clause. It is only the context and common
sense which show that the terms the Teloboians are to be told are the terms
of the main clause subject, Amphitruo, and not the terms of the envoys
themselves. The contrast between suus and eius comes out clearly in the
following example:
(35) videtque ipse ad paupertatem protractum esse se
suamque filiam esse adultam virginem,
simul eius matrem suamque uxorem mortuam. (Pl. Trin. 109–11)
He sees that he himself has been reduced to poverty, that his daughter is
a grown-up girl, and that at the same time her mother, his wife, has died.
Here the two instances of suam show the connection with the main clause
subject: the first modifies the girl, who is the daughter of the subject, the
second modifies the deceased woman, who was the wife of the subject.
The wife was of course also the daughter’s mother, but since the daughter
is neither subject of the main clause nor subject of the accusative and
infinitive, the connection between her and her mother is established with
eius.
The third context in which suus rather than eius is used has to do with
the original meaning of suus, which seems to have been ‘his own’ rather
than just ‘his’. Thus if speakers want to emphasise the close connection
between two elements, they can use suus non-reflexively. We saw this above
in example (20); the construction is best known in collocations of the type
suum cuique ‘to each his own’. 29
The situation in the Romance languages is somewhat different. Meus
‘my’, tuus ‘your’, noster ‘our’ and voster ‘your’ survive in Italian as mio, tuo,
nostro and vostro, without any real change in meaning. In the third person,
however, there has been a remarkable change. Latin used to distinguish
between reflexive suus and non-reflexive eius. Morphologically, suus is like
the other possessive adjectives, but it is unmarked for number, that is, it
can mean ‘his/her’ as well as ‘their’. Eius is the genitive of is and as such it
does not agree with its head noun in case, number and gender; it means
29 Because of the close proximity between suus and quisque the two sometimes came to be regarded as
a single element, leading to case attraction. E. Löfstedt (1956: ii.114) mentions case attraction of suus
in suae cuique parti (Liv. 3.22.6) forsuos cuique parti ‘to each part its own people’, and attraction of
quisque in omnia . . . suo quoque loco (Var. R. 1.22.6) foromnia . . . suo quidque loco ‘all . . . each in its
place’. In Plautus the latter type of attraction occurs twice: suo quique [= abl.] loco ‘each in its place’
(Mos. 254, Poen. 1178), in a phrase almost identical to the one in Varro. Some instances without
attraction have interesting patterns of verb agreement: suos quisque visunt ‘eachgoestoseehisown’
with plural verb agreement (Epid. 212, cf. also Rud. 980). With uterque the same occurs: cum amica
sua uterque . . . eatis ‘each of you should go with his girlfriend’, with the verb in the second person
plural and the noun modified by a third-person possessive.