1 (1) Pythagoras of Samos instructed the region of Italy once called ...

(12) Then I was on the point of saying that there seem to be a few extraordinary cases,
exceptions to the rule, as with the pronouns ‘mine, ‘yours,’ and ‘his,’ to which ‘another’s’
is related: ‘I gave mine,’ ‘I did not give yours,’ ‘he never gives his, but another’s,’ as in
Sallust: ‘coveting another’s, having squandered his own.’ 71 But there is also a particular
cause behind this in that these words, unlike those mentioned above, do not signify a
bodily or, so to speak, a substantial thing, since ‘mine,’ ‘yours,’ ‘his’ and ‘another’s’
have as much to do with quality and action as with substance, as in ‘lying is not my
[way].’
(13) Moreover, there is a another reason why these words cannot be brought under the
rule, as it seems, when the substantive in question does not agree with its referent in
gender, as in the passage of Homer that I mentioned, ‘to be many-mastered is no good.’ 72
Also in Vergil:
For barnyard beasts the wolf is grim,
And storms for field plants ripe;
For us unhappy Amaryllis
Blows like wind through trees.
Water’s sweet when kids are weaned,
Sweet the strawberry tree;
Pliant willows feed birthing herds,
Amyntas alone feeds me.
And elsewhere in Vergil:
… inconstant and ever mutable is
woman,
and in Cicero: ‘Death seems evil to me,’ and also ‘Is it evil because it is grievous.’
(14) This also occurs when the reference is to an infinitive, as in Juvenal:
Leaning on another’s reputation is a thing to be pitied,
71 Zippel cites Sall. Cat. 5.4.
72 Valla translates the first three words of two lines from the Iliad which he has already quoted (2.1) in
Greek: ouk agathon polukoiraniê. The second word, meaning ‘good,’ is a neuter adjective, but the noun to
which it refers, ‘the rule of many,’ is feminine; Valla mirrors this incongruity in Latin with a neuter
adjective (bonum) and a masculine noun (principatus). The passages that follow from Vergil, Cicero and
Juvenal make the same point. The word (suppositum) translated here as ‘referent’ is the past participle of a
verb (suppono) common in classical Latin, but the classical word is by no means equivalent to the
suppositum of medieval logic and grammar, a major point of contention among the philosophers whom
Valla attacks.
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