Kitap 17
13
THE particle quin, which the grammarians call a conjunction, seems to connect sentences in various ways and with divers meanings. For it seems to have one meaning when we say, as if chiding or questioning or exhorting, quin venis? Why don't you come? quin legis? Why don't you read? or quin fugis? Why don't you flee?; but it has a different meaning when we affirm, for example, that there is no doubt but that (quin) Marcus Tullius is the most eloquent of all men, and still a third, when we add something which seems contradictory to a former statement: Isocrates did not plead causes, not but that he thought it useful and honourable so to do. In the last of these sentences the meaning is not very different from that which is found in the third book of Marcus Cato's Origins: Frag. 73, Peter2. these I describe last, not but that they are good and valiant peoples. This rather difficult example I do not find in our grammars. Also in the second book of the Origins Marcus Cato has used this particle in a very similar manner: Id. 36. He did not consider it enough to have slandered him privately, without openly defaming his character.
