I was wondering if Gerundives, the verbal adjectives referred to as "future passive participles" by Latin grammarians, can appear as predicates of Ablative Absolute constructions.
As is well-known, the predicates of Ablative Absolutes can be passive perfect participles (e.g., Cicerone occiso), present participles (e.g., Cicerone loquente), nouns (e.g., Cicerone consule), and adjectives (e.g., Cicerone vivo). Interestingly, as pointed out by Lavency (1985: 196) in his excellent descriptive grammar of Latin (VSVS. Grammaire latine. Description du latin classique en vue de la lecture des auteurs. Paris: Duculot), future active participles are also found as predicates of Ablative Absolutes, as in the following example from Livy:
Carthaginienses prima luce oppugnaturis hostibus castra saxis augent vallum. (Liv. 28, 15)
In contrast, Gerundives, which, as noted above, have sometimes been (wrongly) referred to as "future passive participles", seem to be prevented from appearing as predicates in (true) Ablative Absolutes. But perhaps such a prohibition is not well-grounded and examples similar to the following one are also attested/possible. Any thoughts?
Carthaginienses prima luce oppugnandis castris saxis augent vallum.
NB I: true Ablative Absolutes (AAs) involve functioning on sentence level. Accordingly, examples like Insectandis patribus tribunatum gessit (Livy 3, 65,4) 'He spent his tribunate in attacking the patricians' are not to be regarded as true AAs but rather as dominant participle-like constructions that involve lower syntactic embedding (e.g., in this case, Verbal Phrase (VP)-embedding rather than sentential one). As a result, the agent of insectari must be the same as that of the main verb. Importantly, such a restriction does not necessarily apply to (true) AAs. Accordingly, true AAs are those AAs that satisfy the following two conditions: (i) they function as adverbial subordinate clauses AND (ii) they do not necessarily involve an obligatory sharing of participants/arguments with the ones of the main clause. This said, it is worth pointing out that for other people only one condition (or even other conditions) must be satisfied.
NB II: the present post is also related to Joonas's insightful point on what a predicate of an Ablative Absolute can be: see his specific question on the (im)possibilitify of finding locative Prepositional Phrases (PPs) acting as predicates of Ablative Absolutes. As pointed out in my answer to his intriguing question, my intuition is that locative/PP phrases cannot be predicates in Ablative Absolutes either.