Ch. 21

A Few Distinguished Jewish Fighters

Hic etiam vir quidam Judaeus, praedicatione ac memoria dignus1 inventus est, Sammaei2 filius Eleazarus, cui3 Saab4 Galilaeae patria fuit. Is5 enim saxum ingens alte sublatum, tanta vi super arietem6 ex muro demisit, ut7 machinae caput abrumperet, idque8 ex mediis hostibus saltu ad eos delatus auferret, nulloque metu reportaret ad murum. Postremo tanquam9 signum quo tela mitterent, hostibus propositus, nudo10 corpore quinque sagittarum vulneribus fixus est : earumque11 nulla respecta, ubi murum ascendit, unde iam videri ab omnibus poterat, sua audacia ibi constitit, contractusque12 dolore plagarum cum ariete decidit. Post hunc13 fortissimi extiterunt duo fratres Neritas14 et Philippus de vico Ruma14 Galilaei. Qui15 cum super milites decimae legionis prosiliissent, tanto impetu vique irruerunt, ut et aciem Romanorum perrumperent, quique16 adversum ierant, omnes in fugam verterent.

tanta vi earlier. caput is neuter, so take it as your direct object here.

  1. Dignus: dignus, -a, um always takes the ablative, like the two found before dignus in this sentence ↩

  2. Sammaei filius Eleazarus: it will truly crush me if we can’t figure out which one is the son and which one is the father….. ↩

  3. Cui: dative of possession here, for whom ↩

  4. Saab Galilaeae: Saab is a town in Galilee. Remember that Hebrew proper nouns often do not decline ↩

  5. Is … demisit: Is is your subject and demisit is your main verb. Then, match up adjective/noun pairs and prepositional phrases. Note alte as an adverb, high ↩

  6. Arietem: the aires, arietis (m) is the battering ram, a common tactic used in sieges ↩

  7. ut machinae caput abrumperet: Think about what kind of ut clause this is, especially given the ↩

  8. Idque…auferret: Idque is referring to the machinae caput in the previous sentence, and is your direct object of auferret. Saltu is ablative of means, “by a leap”. Take in this order : delatus saltu ex mediis hostibus ad eos idque auferret ↩

  9. tanquam signum quo tela mitterent: the Romans are the subject of mitterent. Tanquam signum – like/as if a target. quo is probably an ablative of location, there ↩

  10. Nudo copore: surely not naked naked, but rather just that he is without armor ↩

  11. Earmque … respecta: ablative absolute ↩

  12. Contractusque: having been undone ↩

  13. Hunc: pronoun referring back to Eleazer, most correctly translated as this one ↩

  14. Neritas et Philippus: no other mention of these two is found. Ruma is perhaps modern day Khirbet Rumeh ↩ ↩2

  15. Qui: connective relative ↩

  16. quique: connect this to the omnes in the next clause ↩

All material is taken, with gratitude, from The Latin Library as well as my own work, available under the Creative Commons Attribution Share-Alike license CC BY-SA 4.0