Is "victa serpente" an ablative absolute?

Question

I'm reading Ovid's Metamorphoses, and there's this sentence:

Delius hunc nuper, victa serpente superbus,
viderat adducto flectentem cornua nervo
“quid” que “tibi, lascive puer, cum fortibus armis?”
dixerat: ...

^{emphasis mine}

The phrase looks to me like an ablative absolute -- noun and participle, both in the ablative, set off from the rest of the sentence -- but the teacher translated it as "arrogant thanks to the victory over the serpent", which doesn't sound like one. Is this just a colloquial translation, or is it not an ablative absolute?

Answer 1

It's possible, but unlikely. First, the closeness of the words suggests a connection between them, and the commas mean the editors agreed.

More importantly, though, superbus governs an ablative. See e.g. Vergil's Aeneid 5.268, where the ones who received a gift were "opibus superbi", or later in 5.478 where Entellus is "tauro superbus", or in prose with Cicero "superbiorem te pecunia facit".

When used as such, it actually typically has the meaning of "exultant or glorying (in)" (as noted in the Oxford Latin Dictionary under § 1.d). So the above examples would be translated not as "proud" but rather:

opibus superbi = glorying in their [new] riches

tauro superbus = glorying in his [new] bull

superbiorem te pecunia facit = makes you exultant in your wealth

The OLD furnishes a couple other examples, like Cic. Agr. 2.95, "Campani semper superbi bonitate agrorum" (the Campanians always glorying in the goodness of their fields / the Campanians are extremely proud of their good fields).

So here, the proper translation is "glorying in the defeat of the snake".

Answer 2

It seems most natural to me to translate that as a causal ablative. The Delian is arrogant due to the victory over the serpent. Compare this for example with dono laetus, "happy due to the gift", and notice that serpens victa does not only mean "the defeated serpent" but also "victory over the serpent".

Absolute ablative is also possible, but then victa serpente modifies the whole clause, not just superbus. It would be more like "After the serpent was slain, he arrogantly…" which also makes sense.

There is a choice to make in the translation, and possibly there are more options than these two. I would go with ablativus causae, as that is the simplest and most obvious interpretation. Your teacher's translation also does this; if it was an absolute ablative, I would translate with a different tone than "arrogant thanks to the victory over the serpent".

The absolute ablative is often best translated as a separate (temporal or causal) clause, not an attribute. The causal ablative is an attribute.

Answer 3

Victa serpente is not to be interpreted/analyzed here as an "Ablative Absolute" but rather as a dominant participle construction (see below for a definition) depending on an adjective superbus, which takes a complement in ablative case (NB: so-called "Ablative Absolutes" act as adverbial subordinate clauses, whereby they do not depend on adjectives but are adjuncts to sentences).

So-called "dominant participle" constructions are often referred to as Ab Urbe Condita (AUC) constructions, where the participle can often be translated into English/Romance via a nominalization: e.g., ab urbe condita 'since the foundation of the city/Rome'; de Milone per vim expulso queri 'to complain about Milo's violent expulsion', absoluto Scaevola gaudere 'to be delighted by Scaevola’s acquittal', victa serpente superbus 'glorying in the defeat of the snake'; etc. NB: importantly, as you can see, dominant participle constructions can depend on a preposition, on a verb, or on an adjective (as in the present question: superbus).

"Dominant participle" constructions (aka. AUC constructions) are defined by Panhuis (2006: 172) as follows: "syntactically speaking, an attributive participle modifies its head noun. But as far as content is concerned, the participle may express the leading idea and thus be the dominant element in the phrase" (Dirk Panhuis (2006). Latin Grammar. Section 363: "Dominant participle").

Basically, the idea of "dominant" participle comes from the fact that the participle in an AUC cannot be omitted but it is compulsory. Otherwise, the construction is ruled out or its meaning is changed. Notice that the meaning of ab urbe condita (on the AUC reading) is quite different from that of ab urbe: semantically speaking, the complement of the preposition is an entity in the latter, but a state of affairs or a situation in the former.