This article offers a linguistic commentary on the verse Verg. Aen. 9. 427 me, me, adsum qui feci, in me conuertite ferrum, in which the personal pronoun in the accusative needs interpretation. Since the time of Servius and Donatus, the opinions of commentators have been divided. Servius and his followers believe that the pronoun in the accusative is a direct complement that depends on an implied (omitted) verb like interficite, occidite, or petite, and consider this place as a rhetorical figure of aposiopesis. Donatus, on the other hand, argues that the accusative me, me is independent, while discontinuous intonation with which the whole verse must be uttered emphasizes the extreme degree of despair of Nisus, who cannot prevent the death of his beloved friend Euryalus. A review of the commentaries on the Aeneid shows that there are slightly more supporters of Donatus’ hypothesis than that of Servius’, but all of their reasoning is intuitive and does not explain why it is the syntactically independent accusative that gives the agitated sounding to Nisus’ last words. The author of the article applies the pragmatic approach to the interpretation of this place, analyzing similar examples of “non-syntactic” use of the accusative and considering both traditional and modern views on this phenomenon. As a result, the author comes to the conclusion that the verse under consideration corresponds to what in modern linguistics is called “cleft construction”. Such constructions exist in different languages and serve to express the focus of contrast. At the end of the study, the author attempts to answer the question of why Latin employs the accusative as a tool to express intense emotions
This article compares the use of two similar ways of expressing relative future tense in Latin: the future passive infinitive and the construction fore/futurum (esse) ut. This construction is regularly found in the same contexts as the future infinitives, and may serve as an alternative for verbs lacking a supine form. What appears to be of particular interest is its widespread use in cases where a supine is available, and the future infinitive could have been used. Up to the present day, there have been very few studies on this topic. In the present study, the author aims to fill this gap and to examine the relevant syntactic constructions in the passive voice, to begin with a limited corpus of examples. Cicero’s texts were chosen as the material for the study, since they preserve the largest number of these forms, furthermore, such material allows us to conduct the study within the language of one author. The study was conducted with the help of the computer database PHI-5. Having examined the resulting sample, the author identifies tendencies typical for the use of the infinitive and the construction, as well as their pragmatic features and differences. The infinitive is used in objective contexts with a high degree of epistemic support and, as a rule, when there are valid reasons to believe that a certain event will happen. The fore ut construction in our corpus is chosen either to denote the events that were not destined to happen or to convey someone else’s opinion, and introduces a subjective and sometimes counterfactual overtone into the embedded predication. The set of verbs that occur as future infinitives and those used in the predication embedded under fore ut does not overlap, with few exceptions, which may be due to the different aspectual characteristics of these verbs.