The genitive case
The genitive case is used to relate one noun to another. (In fact, this is a characteristic feature of all the languages in the Indo-European family that includes Latin.) While you may often find that nouns in the genitive case are translated with the English preposition “of,” it is important to understand the range of underlying ideas expressed by the genitive in Latin.
Some general uses of the genitive
The complicated story of Procris and her husband Cephalus illustrates some common uses of the genitive case.
- Possession: Diana gave to Procris a hunting dog, and Hyginus refers to the potentia canis. potentia is a nominative noun, “power, strength;” canis is genitive singular, “dog.” Here, the genitive expresses possession: the dog possessed strength or power. In these instances, we might translate the genitive into English with the preposition “of” or with the possessive marker “‘s,” “the dog’s strength,” or “the strength of the dog.”
- Subjective genitive or objective genitive: Cephalus admired the dog greatly, and Hyginus refers to the amor canis. amor, amoris f. means “love, admiration”. There is always an ambiguity when the noun expressing a verbal idea is modified by a second noun in the genitive case, just as there is in an English phrase like “love of God.” Does that mean that God loves someone? If so, we would say it is a subjective genitive, since we are intepreting the meaning of the phrase “of God” as the equivalent of the subject of a verb “to love.” But it could equally mean the love that someone feels for God. We would call that an objective genitive, since we are interpreting “of God” as the equivalent of a direct object in a phrase like “they love God.” In this passage of Hyginus, the context makes it clear that he is referring to Cephalus’ love for or admiration of the hunting dog, not the dog’s love for Cephalus, but grammaticaly the amor canis is identical to what a pet owner could say to refer to their faithful dog’s love.
Hyginus’ story of Erechtheus’ four daughters illutrates another common use of the genitive to refer to a group or “whole,” when the noun it modifies names part of the whole or one among the group.
- Partitive genitive or genitive of the whole: Erechtheus’ daughters took an oath that if one of them died, the others would commit suicide. Hyginus expresses this with the phrase una eārum. As we’ll see in this chapter, eārum is the feminine genitive plural form of a pronoun meaning “them”; una is a nominative form meaning “one woman.”