Auster misceat mare aestum

Question

This is from Boethius Consolation of Philosophy, which can be found here:

http://mizar.unive.it/mqdq/public/testo/testo?codice=BOETH%7Ccons%7C001

Si mare uoluens Turbidus Auster Misceat aestum,

And is translated here:

http://thelatinreadingblog.blogspot.com/search/label/boethius

I'm having trouble with 'aestum'. If the above sentence means: If the turbulent South Wind stirs the rolling sea into a passion, where 'aestum' means passion, then I'm having trouble with case of 'aestum'. If it is accusative then we have two accusative nouns: 'mare' and 'aestum' which doesn't make sense to me. Further, if 'aestum' is accusative then that would ruin the meter since the meter is

. - u u | - - (the dot is necessary since stackexchange uses - as a coding element)

And that line would break the meter with:

. - u u | - u

It could also be that 'aestum' is a plural genetive but then it would have to be spelled 'aestuum'. However, some people believe that double vowels were pronounced as one long vowel (I can track down a link if you really want me to) and maybe in the 5th century things had departed a bit from classical Latin and 4th declension plural genitives were written with one final 'u'. A third solution is that I think sometimes the final element of a poetic line is not all that important because a short vowel can be compensated with a silent pause so as to not destroy the rhythm. Let me know if there is a 4th solution.

Answer 1

Syntax

"mare" and "aestum" are both accusative: "mare" is the accusative object of the participle "volvens", while "aestum" is the accusative object of the finite verb "misceat".

"Volvens" here is a verbal participle meaning something like "-rolling", as in "The sea-rolling South Wind" (with the sense "the South Wind, which makes the sea roll"). Present participles in Latin can be used verbally or adjectivally; when used verbally, a present participle can take an accusative direct object, the same as a finite verb. (They can also take other kinds of complements that finite verbs can take.) Allen and Greenough's Latin Grammar describes this by saying that the participle "may govern a case" and "often takes an object" (§488).

There is an example of the use of volvens used predicatively with the accusative direct object hostilia cadavera in §496:

Volventēs hostīlia cadāvera amīcum reperiēbant. (Sall. Cat. 61)
While rolling over the corpses of the enemy they found a friend. [Time]

Based on my reading of dictionary entries, it appears volvo is more often transitive than intransitive.

Scansion

For the scansion, it is a general rule of Latin poetry that any syllable can be used as the final syllable of a line, regardless of its lexically specified weight/length. One way of interpreting that is that any line-final syllable counts as long. It's therefore not possible for a line to break the meter by ending in - u.