When including the following poetic examples from Horace and Ovid in what turned out to be a long answer to a previous post on datives of agent, I made this hesitant remark: Perhaps I'm wrong but I'd say that the following (non-canonical) datives of agent that can be found in poetry are not (expected) to be found in classical prose authors like Cicero or Caesar. Basically, only canonical datives of agent are typically found in these two authors (e.g. Haec vobis provincia est defendenda; Hoc mihi deliberatum est; cf. Habeo hoc deliberatum). Could anyone share his/her experienced intuition about examples like the following ones with me?
Prima dicte mihi, summa dicende Camena … Maecenas (Hor. epist. 1,1) ‘Proclaimed by me in my first poetry, to be proclaimed in my last, Maecenas, …’
adde preces castas inmixtaque vota timori, // nunc quoque te salvo persoluenda mihi. (Ov. epist. 6, 73-74) ‘Add chaste prayers and vows mixed with fear, which now I must fulfill, since you are safe.’
carmina ... quae scribuntur aquae potoribus (Hor. epist. 1,19,3) ‘The poems which are written by water drinkers.’
This poetic usage has been said to be traced back to Greek (for this proposal, see Brenous, J. (1895). Étude sur les hellénismes dans la syntaxe latine. (Edizione Anastatica, L’Erma di Bretschneider, Roma 1965.) Paris: Klincksieck); see also Tillmann, H. (1881). De dativo verbis passivis linguae Latinae subiecto qui vocatur Graecus. Acta Seminarii Philologici Erlangensis, 2, 71–140. For a brief summary of this tricky issue, see Calboli, G. (2009). Latin syntax and Greek. In P. Baldi & P. Cuzzolin (Eds.), New Perspectives on Historical Latin Syntax. Volume 1 Syntax of the Sentence (pp. 65-194). Berlin/New York: De Gruyter Mouton.
As noted above, I'd find it surprising if in Cicero's texts one could find examples like orationes dictae mihi or carmina scribuntur Terentiae, with these datives having an agentive interpretation (cf. the ablatives of agent a me and a Terentia). Clearly, in classical prose authors like Cicero or Caesar these datives in these examples can only have a beneficiary reading but not an agentive one. But how about with other verbs?
The three following alleged "datives of agent" provided below by cmw, Cerberus, and myself, respectively, are found with a productive set of acquisition verbs (e.g. expetere, quaerere, sumere, conciliare, emere, etc.), which crucially can also take a dative in the active. These examples can be easily found in Cicero but, unlike the ones above found in poetry, should not be considered as "Greek datives of agent", i.e. they are not an influence from Greek authors (of course, they are also different from typical/canonical datives of agent like the one found in Carthago nobis delenda est).
Sic dissimillimis bestiolis communiter cibus quaeritur (Nat. Deor. 2.123)
Sumatur nobis quidam praestans vir (Cic. Tusc. 5.68)
nos hunc Heracliensem multis civitatibus expetitum (...) de nostra civitate eiciemus? (Cic. Arch. 22)
cmw also provides an interesting example from Tacitus (see also the interesting answer by Cerberus to a related post). I should say that I deliberately included Caesar & Cicero in this Q to restrict the classical period a bit (e.g. later "datives of agent" can be found depending on non-verbal adjectives or even on active (!) verbs (Pinkster 2015: 248/9; vol. 1. Oxford Latin Syntax)). Non-canonical examples of datives of agent from an author like Sallustius would also be welcome.
