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I was intrigued by my question to ask this question. In that questions we have a sequence of 2 ablative nouns in a row:

"[Dama] differt a capreis [solis] cornibus ..."

I don't count solis because it is an adjective and adjectives are easily appended. For this question adjectives can be ignored altogether. So basically every ablative noun should have different role in the sentence. (or different ablative type)

In the example above, I think we can add (at least theoretically - for the sake of the demonstration) another ablative noun to signify the time :

"[Dama] differt a capreis [solis] cornibus hora [nona] ..."

So in that case we would have 3 ablative nouns in a row.

My question is, therefore, what is the longest sequence of nouns ablative (in a row - only allowed to be separated by adjective ablatives), to appear in the large corpus of Latin texts? Or, alternatively, if you can generate a sound sentence yourself that contain a long sequence, please share it.

My question is also valid with the dative case. to which I can think of a sequence of 2 such as: "mihi cordi est"

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  • Draconis's answer on Latin Stack Exchange “Malo” in Motto Maelstrom explains three in a row Malo malo malo malo; " it's the ablative of position of mālus, "apple tree"; in the third line, it's the ablative of comparison of mālus, "upright beam, post, mast" (or "ship" by synecdoche); in the fourth line, it's the masculine ablative of mălus, "bad"."
    – Hugh
    Jan 13, 2020 at 17:39
  • And this site has nine ablatives (but only seven, then "quam" ) angustrumble.blogspot.com/2009/08/malo-malo-malo-malo.html
    – Hugh
    Jan 13, 2020 at 17:50
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    @Hugh, thank you for this beautiful insight. I think it would be more valuable as an answer. please consider posting at as an answer. at any case, for navigation, here Draconis's answer: latin.stackexchange.com/questions/7346/malo-in-motto-maelstrom/…
    – d_e
    Jan 13, 2020 at 18:30

1 Answer 1

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The upgraded malo sentence mentioned by Hugh has 4 ablative nouns in a row since the first malo is a verb and two of the others are adjectives.

I've got 9:

Ea re, concitato equo periculis imminentibus, ipso illo die hora nona, Flumentana porta spe duce Roma profectus sum.

"For that reason, having spurred the horse in the face of the imminent dangers, that very day at the ninth hour I set out from Rome through the Porta Flumentana, guided by hope."


Note that the adverbial Roma ("from Rome") is in simple ablative because it's a proper name of city.

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