498 PROCEEDINGS OF THE AMERICAN ACADEMY. 



two examples are rather to be treated among those violations of regular 

 usage which crop out here and there even in the best writers. It is 

 true that I know of no similar certain case of noceri before Ulpian, Dig. 

 43, 19, 3, 2 ; for Sen. Ira, 3, 5, 4, cited by Neue (Formenlehre III, 5), 

 is not a personal use, and Nepos, 7, 4, 2, is open to doubt. But for 

 examples of other verbs which take the dative in the active voice and 

 which occur occasionally in the personal use in the passive, cf. crederetur, 

 Cic. R. A. 103 and credor used thus by Ovid, Tr. 3, 10, 35, and M. 7, 

 98 ; obstrepi, Cic. Marc. 9 ; antecelluntur, Rhet. Herenn. 2, 48 ; invideor, 

 Hor. A. P. 56; imperor, Hor. Ep. 1, 5, 21 ; and the numerous instances 

 of the passive participle of persuadeo, Wolfflin, Rhein. Mus. XXXVII, 

 115 f. 



' Est causa cognoscere, 59, 17, instead of cognoscendi is a construction 

 now and then occurring in the poets; cf. Madvig, Lai. Gr. § 419. It 

 has been noticed that the genitive of the gerund is very rare in Vitruvius, 

 whereas the ablative is exceedingly frequent ; cf. Praun, p. 57 ff. It is, 

 as we know, the ablative form which passes into the Romance languages 

 Italian and Spanish.' — There is nothing in est causa cognoscere that 

 points to late authorship, for nothing like it is cited in any other author, 

 late or early. The peculiarity of it does not consist in the construction 

 used with the word causa, for the infinitive with this word occurs in 

 poets (Verg. A. 10, 90; Tib. 3, 2, 30; Lucan, 5, 464), and for the gen- 

 eral principle involved see Schmalz, Lat. Gramm. 3 p. 293. The peculiar- 

 ity lies in the meaning of the word causa, for, as Praun has remarked 

 (p. 20), est causa here is equivalent to operae pretium, and no parallel 

 for this, early or late, is cited. It must therefore be considered as a 

 peculiarity of the author. 39 With regard to the rest of Ussing's para- 

 graph, two observations should be made. First, that the rare use of the 

 genitive of the gerund in Vitruvius (only five occurrences, Praun, p. 57 f.) 

 is partly due to the fact that he never uses it with an adjective or with 

 causa or gratia (Praun, ibid.). But with adjectives this construction 

 is very rare in old Latin, not common in the classical writers, and 

 of slow growth before Tacitus, who greatly developed it (Lane, Lat. 

 Gramm. § 2258 ; Schmalz, 3 p. 304). See also Praun's remarks (p. 65) 

 on the use of the gerund or gerundive construction with ad, instead of in 

 the genitive, as found in writings of less formal and polished style. 

 Secondly, regarding the prevalence of the ablative construction in Vitru- 

 vius, this is the commonest of all the gerund and gerundive constructions 



39 Ruse 2 emends to causam. 



