L.
Trepidam urbem ac simul atrocitatem recentis sceleris, simul (simul … simul: ‘both …and’) veteres Othonis mores paventem novus insuper de Vitellio nuntius exterruit, (trepidam urbem … exterruit: novus nuntius is subject of exterruit and trepidam urbem …paventem its object, atrocitatem and veteres Othonis mores are objects of paventem) ante caedem Galbae suppressus ut tantum superioris Germaniae exercitum descivisse crederetur. (suppressus ut …crederetur: suppressus refers to nuntius; the ut clause is final.) tum duos omnium mortalium (duos omnium mortalium: i.e. Otho and Vitellius) impudicitia ignavia luxuria deterrimos velut (velut: ‘seemingly’) ad perdendum imperium fataliter electos non senatus modo et eques, quis aliqua pars et cura rei publicae, (quis aliqua pars et cura rei publicae: quis is for quibus, dat. of possessor with an implied form of esse.) sed vulgus quoque palam maerere. (maerere: hist. infinitive) nec iam recentia saevae pacis exempla sed repetita bellorum civilium memoria (nec iam recentia saevae pacis exempla sed repetita [est] bellorum civilium memoria: ‘no longer the recent examples of a violent peace brought back to mind, but the memories of civil wars’.) captam totiens suis exercitibus urbem, vastitatem Italiae, direptiones provinciarum, Pharsaliam Philippos et Perusiam ac Mutinam, nota publicarum cladium nomina, loquebantur. (urbem,…vastitatem…direptiones …Pharsaliam Philippos et Perusiam ac Mutinam, nota…nomina, loquebantur: loquor, can have transitive meaning and accept direct objects with the sense of ‘to talk of’, ‘to speak about’, ‘to mention’; indirect speech continues down to qui vicisset. Pharsaliam, Philippos, Perusiam, Mutinam: names of places where famous battles were fought that spelt the end of the Roman republic; Pharsalia is the region around Pharsalus in eastern Greece, near the NW tip of the island of Euboea, but on the mainland; here Julius Caesar defeated Pompei in 48 BC. Philippi is in Thrace in NE Greece, near today’s town of Kavala, where in 42 BC Marc Antony and Octavian defeated Brutus and Cassius, Caesar’s assassins. At Perusia, today Perugia between Forence and Rome, Octavian defeated Marc Antony’s brother, and then sacked the town in 41 BC. At Mutina, modern Modena in north central Italy, Octavian and the consuls Hirtius and Pansa defeated Marc Antony, who was besieging the town, in 43 BC.) prope eversum orbem etiam cum de principatu inter bonos certaretur, (cum …certaretur: temporal cum requires subjunctive whenever the tense is imperfect; certaretur is impersonal use of passive of intransitive verbs: ‘it was fought over …’.) sed mansisse G. Iulio, mansisse Caeare Augusto victore (G. Iulio [victore] … Caeare Augusto victore: abl. abs. possibly of causal sense: ‘inasmuch as Julius Caesar and Caesar Augustus were the victors’) imperium; mansuram fuisse sub Pompeio Brutoque rem publicam: (mansuram fuisse sub Pompeio Brutoque rem publicam: the infinitive clause is actually a conditional sentence of which the protasis is in the form of a prepositional phrase, sub Pompeio Brutoque, in place of, for example, si Pompeius Brutusque vincissent; since in indirect discourse the verb of the apodosis must be infinitive, to express the conditional idea Latin has recourse to the future participle of the verb, mansuram in this case, followed by esse or fuisse, depending on whether the condition is potential or unreal.) nunc pro Othone an pro Vitellio in templa ituros? utrasque impias preces, utraque detestanda vota inter duos, quorum bello solum id scires, deteriorem fore qui vicisset. (quorum bello solum id scires, deteriorem fore qui vicisset: scires is imperfect potential subjunctive, the second person singular being equivalent to the indefinite pronoun ‘one’ in English: ‘in whose war one would know only one thing for certain, that the worse of the two would be the one who would have won’. Note that scires, here in rel. clause in indirect discourse, would remain unchanged in direct discourse. deteriorem fore qui vicisset: subjunctive for relative clause dependent on an infinitive, a case of modal attraction; cf. G. 662.) erant qui Vespasianum et arma Orientis augurarentur, (erant qui … augurarentur: for sunt qui followed by subjunctive cf. erant quos … accenderet in ch. 25.) et ut potior utroque (utrasque… utraque … utroque: utrasque and utraque are adverbs, ‘on both occasions’ and ‘on both sides’ respectively’; utroque is abl. of the pronoun or adj. uterque, ‘each of the two’, in this case abl. of comparison with potior, cf. A.G. 406.) Vespasianus, ita bellum aliud atque alias cladis horrebant. ((ut …ita: ut and its correlative ita introduce a comparative sentence, ‘to the extent that Vespasian was better than both, to the same extent they abhorred another war and other battles’.)) et ambigua de Vespasiano fama, solusque omnium ante se principum in melius mutatus est.