Saturday, November 23, 2024
A Laughingstock
Plautus, Miles Gloriosus 92 (tr. Wolfgang de Melo):
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Wherever he goes, he's everyone's laughingstock.Deridiculo is classified as predicative dative by Henry John Roby, A Grammar of the Latin Language from Plautus to Suetonius, Part II (London: Macmillan and Co., 1892), p. xlvi, as dative of purpose or tendency by Charles E. Bennett, Syntax of Early Latin, Vol. II: The Cases (Boston: Allyn and Bacon, 1914), p. 172. See Harm Pinkster, The Oxford Latin Syntax, Vol. I: The Simple Clause (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015), pp. 778-782 = ยง 9.34 "Nouns (rarely noun phrases) in the dative functioning as subject complement." Pinkster doesn't, however cite this example from Plautus. See also Thesaurus Linguae Latinae V:631 and Gonzales Lodge, Lexicon Plautinum, Vol. I (Leipzig: B.G. Teubner, 1924), p. 368.
is deridiculo est, quaqua incedit, omnibus.
