Stacking many infinitives

Question

Consider the sentence: Dixit se velle posse audere venire. ("He said that he wants to be able to dare to come.") This has a stack of four infinitives.

In theory we might be able to stack as many infinitives as we like; maybe you can argue that just stacking arbitrarily many copies of posse and velle will make some logical sense. Therefore I want to ground this more practically: How many infinitives do we find stacked in extant Latin literature?

By a stack of infinitives I mean that they are nested. In my example the object of velle is posse audere venire, that of posse is audere venire, and that of audere is venire. An example of infinitives that are not stacked would be: Dixit se et velle et posse venire. Here velle and posse are parallel to each other, not one governing the other, so there number of stacked infinitives is two. The infinitives need not be next to each other.

I was unable to find more than two infinitives (like posse fieri). Do we have three somewhere? Or even more?

(This was inspired by an earlier question and Sebastian's answer to it.)

I would expect at least three to be possible. By the way, do you count a.c.i.? — Cerberus, Sep 16 '22 at 22:16
@Cerberus Yeah, ACI is fine and maybe even the historical infinitive. It's hard to draw clear boundaries. — Joonas Ilmavirta, Sep 16 '22 at 22:29

score 6 · Accepted Answer · answered Sep 22 '22 at 20:22

Tria infinitiva:

Sexto intervallo ab aequinoctio autumnali incipere scribunt oportere serere usque ad diem nonagensimum unum. – Varro, De re rustica 1, 34.
… docuimus Deum necessario existere, hoc est, Deum non posse desinere esse, seu in alium Deum transformari … – Benedictus de Spinoza, Cogitata metaphysica, Pars II, Cap. IV. De immutabilitate Dei.

Stacking many infinitives

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