Kitap 1
7
There chanced to be present there a friend of mine, who had become an expert from wide reading and to whom almost all the older literature had been the object of study, meditation and wakeful nights. He, on examining the book, declared that there was no mistake in writing or grammar in that word, but that Cicero had written correctly and in accordance with early usage. For futurum is not, said he, " to be taken with rem, as hasty and careless readers think, nor is it used as a participle. It is an infinitive, the kind of word which the Greeks call a)pare/mfatos or 'indeterminate,' affected neither by number nor gender, but altogether free and independent, such a word as Gaius Gracchus used in the speech entitled On Publius Popilius, delivered in the places of assembly, Gracchus delivered two speeches against Popilius, one in the Forum at Rome (pro rostris), the other circum conciliabula, in the market-places of various towns of Latium; see Meyer, O. R. F,2 p. 239. in which we read: 'I suppose that my enemies will say this.' He said dicturum, not dicturos; and is it not clear that dicturum in Gracchus is used according to the same principle as futurum in Cicero? Just as in the Greek language, without any suspicion of error, words such as e)rei=n, poih/sein, e)/sesqai, and the like, are used in all genders and all numbers without distinction." He added that in the third book of the Annals of Claudius Quadrigarius are these words: Fr. 43, Peter. While they were being cut to pieces, the forces of the enemy would be busy there (copias . . . futurum) ; and at the beginning of the eighteenth book of the same Quadrigarius: Fr. 79, Peter. If you enjoy health proportionate to your own merit and our good-will, we have reason to hope that the gods will bless the good (deos . . . facturum) ; that similarly Valerius Antias also in his twenty-fourth book wrote: If those religious rites should be performed, and the omens should be wholly favourable, the soothsayers declared that everything would proceed as they desired (omnia . . .processurum esse). Fr. 59, Peter. Plautus also in the Casina, v. 691. speaking of a girl, used occisurum, not occisuram in the following passage: Has Casina a sword?—Yes, two of them.— Why two?—With one she'd fain the bailiff slay, With t'other you. So too Laberius in The Twins wrote: v. 51, Ribbeck.3 I thought not she would do (facturum) it. Now, all those men were not unaware of the nature of a solecism, but Gracchus used dicturum, Quadrigarius futurum and facturum, Antias processurum, Plautus occisurum and Laberius facturum, in the infinitive mood, a mood which is not inflected for mood or number or person or tense or gender, but expresses them all by one and the same form, just as Marcus Cicero did not use fiturum in the masculine or neuter gender—for that would clearly be a solecism—but employed a form which is independent of any influence of gender. Cellius' friend was partly right. Such forms as dicturum were derived from the second supine dictu + *erom (earlier *esom), the infinitive of sum. Later, the resulting form dicturum was looked upon as a participle and declined. In the early writers such infinitives did not change their form, and did not add the tautological esse.
