"Qui meus tuus apud te locus, qui tuus velim ut meus"

Question

In Letter XI of the apocryphal correspondence between Seneca and Saint Paul, the following passage is found

Haut itaque te indignum prima facie epistolarum nominandum censeas, ne temptare me quam laudare videaris, quippe cum scias te civem esse Romanum. Nam qui meus tuus apud te locus, qui tuus velim ut meus. Vale mi Paule carissime.

I am having difficulty identifying the syntactic structure of this sentence:

[Q]ui meus tuus apud te locus, qui tuus velim ut meus.

In particular, I do not understand why there are two correlated relative pronouns and how the syntax should be interpreted.

Answer 1

The passage can be tricky to disentangle because it's highly elliptical. You have a parallel structure, but in Latin, you don't always need to repeat a verb or a subject, and then you have two forms of esse which also dropped (as they are wont to do). But they can be reinserted to make the syntax clearer.

Writing out just the basics less elliptically, you should get:

[velim [ut locus [qui meus est] sit tuus]] (et) [velim [ut locus [qui tuus est] sit meus]]

I wish that the situation which is mine may be yours and I wish that the situation which is yours may be mine.