"gerund + genitive" vs "gerund+accusative" ("scribendo epistulas" vs "scribendo epistularum")

Question

So far I was thinking the way of saying "He spends time in writing letters" (example from A&G) might be terit tempus scribendo epistulas or terit tempus scribendis epistulis.

But can terit tempus scribendo epistularum also convey the same meaning? Following from passage from Cicero where he seems to use the gerund with genitive or I misread things:

Primum enim, ut stante re publica facere solebamus, in agendo plus quam in scribendo operae poneremus, deinde ipsis scriptis non ea, quae nunc, sed actiones nostras mandaremus, ut saepe fecimus.

Answer 1

I would not read the genitive and the gerund together. I suggest this reordering and grouping to clarify:

…(plus operae) poneremus (in agendo) quam (in scribendo)…
≈ …we would put more work into doing than writing…

I see operae as a genitive qualifying plus.

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You could conceivably read in scribendo epistularum as "in the writing of letters", where the letters are not an object but a genitive attribute describing the action scribere. I am not sure whether this kind of use is attested in classical Latin, but this is not what seems to be going on here.

Answer 2

As pointed out in the previous answers, it seems quite clear that plus...operae is an argument of the verb poneremus. I found that some philologists corrected the text as follows: in agendo plus quam in scribendo operam poneremus (e.g. see here), which led me to misinterpret the syntax of this example (see the relevant comment by cnread, who alerted me of that confusion).

Let me address the second part of Joonas's answer/comment, which is more directly related to d/e's question, i.e. to the interesting title of his/her question: “gerund + genitive” vs. “gerund+accusative”. This is indeed a very intriguing issue of Latin syntax. Although the following examples are rare, they do indeed exist (typically, in Early Latin but even in Classical Latin as well: see Cicero's example below):

Lucis das tuendi copiam 'You give me the privilege of seeing the light.' (Plaut. Capt. 1008)

Nominandi istorum tibi erit magis quam edundi copia 'You will have the privilege of naming those things rather than of eating them.' (Plaut. Capt. 852)

Facultas agrorum suis latronibus condonandi 'the opportunity of bestowing lands on his fellows-bandits.' (Cic. Phil. 5. 6)

The genitive gerund of (some of) these examples has been analyzed as "epexegetic(al)", i.e., as "giving further precision to the expression -'opportunity of light, that is of seeing it'" (Palmer (1954/1988: 321-222); cf. also Woodcock (1959: 162-163), i.a.). Personally, I'm not fully convinced by this analysis since I'm afraid that it cannot be applied to all the examples that show this (rare) pattern. It seems more natural to me to analyze these genitive gerunds as having nominal behavior, this fact triggering the genitive case of their object. The double possibility (genitive vs. accusative object) shown in this contrast (e.g., cf. the infrequent constructional pattern facultas agrorum condonandi with the more frequent one facultas agros condonandi) reminds me a bit of the following one in English, where the object of the -ing nominalization can also be prepositional/genitive or not/accusative: e.g., cf. "John's destroying of the city was horrible" vs. "John's destroying the city would result in..." (e.g. see here and here). Clearly, this parallelism is only approximate since in Latin the construction facultas agros condonandi is by far more frequent than the attested example above from Cicero facultas agrorum condonandi (as is well-known, this gerund construction can in turn be compared with the very frequent gerundive construction facultas agrorum condonandorum; for related discussion, please see my answer of this question).

As for d_e's/Joonas's example ((in) scribendo epistularum), this specific constructional pattern does not seem to be attested. In contrast, as noted above, an example like facultas scribendi epistularum could exist. This example seems to involve a sort of blend of two possible "input" constructions: the gerund one (facultas scribendi epistulas) and the gerundive one (facultas scribendarum epistularum). If this proposal holds water, one could try to apply the cognitive linguistic notion of "input space" (see here) in order to account for the creation of (some of) these "blended" examples. Cf also the interesting example from Plautus: tui (feminine!) videndi copiast (Pl. Truc. 370).

Answer 3

No, this construction is impossible because it has nominal syntax (hoc domūs tēctum "this house roof") like the English gerund, while the Latin gerund has verbal syntax (not *in hōc scrībendō "in this writing") and governs the same case as the verb (not *epistolārum scrībere "to write of-letters"). With verbs that govern the genitive, where it expresses the stimulus that evokes some feeling (memory, pity, incrimination), you can say:

• eōs prūdentiae monēmus > tempus perdimus eōs prūdentiae monendō ('to warn them of discretion > we waste time warning them of discretion').

Other than that, nominal syntax with a gerund is probably impossible even in Late Latin, where hoc epistolārum scrībere "this writing of letters, this letter-writing" becomes grammatical. That said, due to the suppletive relationship¹ between the infinitive and the gerund, it wouldn't surprise me to find a substantive-like prepositional use, eg. ?in epistolārum scrībendō in Late/Medieval Latin.

1: the infinitive serves as the nominative of the gerund.

In the Cicero quote, operae is the partitive genitive that depends on plūs as the object of pōnere: 'to put in more work.'

Answer 4

I group the words in the Cicero passage this way:

(in agendo plus quam in scribendo) (operae poneremus)

This makes operae some sort of object of poneremus—I can't tell if it's dative or genitive. Some googling suggests that aliquid operae pono is an idiom for "I put effort into something."

Loeb Classical Library gives this translation (by Walter Miller):

For then, in the first place, I should now be devoting my energies more to public speaking than to writing, as I used to do when the republic stood; and in the second place, I should be committing to written form not these present essays but my public speeches, as I often formerly did.

Apparently Cicero is referring to himself in the plural, and agendo here means "acts" (acting) as in "acts of legislature".