I’m omitting a few words in this sentence to focus on the part in question. Aurigae … ita currus conlocant ut, si illi a multitudine hostium premantur, expeditum ad quos receptum habeant. The charioteers … place together the chariots in such a way that, if those should be pressed by a multitude of the enemy, they would have an unimpeded retreat. I have a book published by a Latin professor that calls the ut clause a result clause. But doesn’t the deliberate placement of the chariots indicate the purpose of providing a ready retreat?
BG 4.33, purpose vs. result
- Thread starter Dumnorix
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Note that that should be suos. (Maybe it was just a typo, but in case.)
My interpretation;
1- They placed the chariots in such a way (for the purpose of) unimpeded retreat.
2- If the army were pressed they would have (the result would be) a retreat.
So, it depends on the relation of the clauses to each other that determines if the clause is result or purpose. In other words; If there were two sentences written as 1, and 2 above it would be easy to tell whether the clauses (and/ or sentences) were result or purpose. However in the original (compound) sentence, “if the army were pressed” is after “ut” and closer to “the retreat” than “placing the chariots in such a way”, so it is a result clause, not purpose.
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One may note that sometimes clauses introduced by ita actually are negated with ne rather than ut non because the sense of intent predominates (e.g. Cicero "ita corrigas ne mihi noceat"), so at that point one could quibble as to whether they are primarily purpose or result, and I think the same would apply here. In this case the priority seems to me to be to understand the sentence correctly, regardless of what you call the clause.
I think you're confusing the apodosis (the "then" part) of a conditional with a result clause; in the sentence "If the army were pressed, (then) they would have a retreat," the clause "they would have a retreat" is just the main clause, rather than any sort of subordinate clause at all. A result clause is a specific type of clause introduced by ut or ut non, not just any part of a sentence that shows a result.
In this sentence, the clause under discussion is ut ... expeditum ad suos reditum habeant. The si clause is a further subordinate clause within that clause, but it's not going to be what determines the type of ut clause we're looking at. That depends only on the relationship between the ut clause and the main clause.
Aurigae ita currus conlocant,
ut,
si illi a multitudine hostium premantur,
expeditum ad suos receptum habeant.
Ita...ut... is a common formula for a result clause ("x does y in such a way as to produce the result z"), which is why this is grammatically speaking a result clause, though it clearly has a sense of purpose/intent in this case and it may well be that Caesar intended it primarily as a purpose clause.
Is there any evidence that the ancients actually made a conceptual distinction between purpose and result clauses? It seems like a fairly natural dichotomy, but on the other hand I can imagine this being an essentially modern way of taxonomizing the various possible uses of the subjunctive.
Yes, specifically the way of negating them and the tenses allowed. Fugit ne quis se caperet = He fled so that no one would capture him; Fugit ut nemo se caperet = He fled such that no one captured him (a bit of an unnatural sentence, normally you would have, say, tam celeriter fugit). And result clauses can take perfect tenses (Tam audacter locutus est ut nemo respondere conatus sit), whereas in a purpose clause that is pretty rare.
Usually, the reflexive pronoun (se) wouldn't be used in a result clause.
Oops — I actually explicitly talked about that in a recent Certamen question I wrote on this exact topic, but forgot to apply it here.
Ah yes, of course, I hadn't considered that. Also
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On further reflection, it also occurs to me that relative clauses of both purpose and result may be indistinguishable (except by context) from clauses of characteristic. And, indeed, a clause of characteristic may also be introduced by quin (particularly after a negative). So the question, really, is if purpose, result, and characteristic are best regarded as having some conceptual overlap or, conversely, if they really are absolutely distinct in principle even when morphologically indistinguishable. I would be fascinated to learn if anyone has come across any discussion of this in the ancient grammarians.
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