63 Colloquial and Li.. - Ganino.com

214 tobias reinhardt
in Lucretius) can have colloquial register. This is arguable in the present
case, because the construction of penetrare, concrete and almost pictorial
as it is, is likely to be modelled on in mentem venit (which also inspired
the less colourful occurit, cf.H–S359), itself a colloquial expression, and
because a colloquial tone would suit the context of the passage, which is
concerned with how the early, primitive humans discovered the technique
of processing ore so as to produce weapons and tools. The infinitive which
depends on penetrabat and in particular the phrase formam et faciem rerum
seems to reflect their point of view rather than the narrator’s, and it would
be in keeping with this perspective to say that the insight was ‘sinking in’
(to use a comparable, but not equivalent, English rendering). While facies
can have the plain technical meaning ‘form’ (OLD s.v. 7; TLL s.v. 49.60
ff.), many of the instances for this use play on or show awareness of the
more elementary meanings ‘physical and outward experience (of men and
animals)’ and ‘face’. Thus Var. L. 6.78 ‘facere’ a facie qui rei quam facit
imponit faciem ‘the word “to make” is from facies because it imposes a facies
onto a thing’, or Sen. Ep. 24.13 non hominibus tantum, sed rebus persona
demenda est et reddenda facies sua ‘we should strip the mask, not only from
men, but from things, and restore to each object its own aspect’. I thus
suggest that here facies is not just a synonym of forma but has the sense of
‘aspect’, ‘features’, which reflects the early humans’ naive view of the world
around them. A related issue is the use of transitive verbs as intransitive
ones and vice versa, which I will not pursue here.
Latin poetic language tends to avoid prepositional phrases in many
cases where these would have been used in prose. Instead, simple cases are
more frequently used; explanations for this phenomenon which have been
offered include syntactic archaism (R. Coleman 1991, 1999a: 79–81) anda
wider tendency to avoid function words in poetic narrative (Adams and
Mayer 1999b: 11). One effect of having simple cases instead of prepositional
phrases is an increased scope for ambiguity, which helps account for the
perceived richness of poetic narrative. It is remarkable that against this
trend Lucretius is a preposition-heavy author (see also Bailey 1947: i.106–
7). Apparently he does not aim for this kind of ambiguity, and is happy to
include function words otherwise not used in poetry outside comedy (see
below, p. 222). Some prepositional phrases in Lucretius arguably reflect
colloquial usages.
The replacement of the dative through a prepositional phrase formed
with ad is a usage which is to be regarded as a colloquialism on grounds of
its distribution and afterlife; see Hofmann and Szantyr (H–S 86, 220), who