High School Latin I

A dog in the doorway

In the entrance passage of a house in Pompeii, buried by ash in AD 79 and dug out in 1824, there is a floor mosaic of a chained dog in black and white tiles. Under the dog, spelled out in the same tiles, are two words: CAVE CANEM. Beware of the dog. The house is now called the House of the Tragic Poet, and that mosaic is the first Latin many visitors ever read. You can read it too, right now, because canem is the word behind English canine.

Here is the household you are going to spend this year with. Read it aloud even though you do not yet know the rules; you will know them by the end of the lesson.

Salvē! Domus magna est. Fīdus canis est. Fīdus in iānuā sedet. Gāius Valerius vir Rōmānus est. Claudia fēmina est. Mārcus puer est. Valeria puella est. Familia Rōmāna in domō habitat.

Word for word: "Hello! The house is big. Fidus is a dog. Fidus sits in the doorway. Gaius Valerius is a Roman man. Claudia is a woman. Marcus is a boy. Valeria is a girl. A Roman family lives in the house." The dog is called Fīdus because fīdus is the Latin adjective for faithful; a Roman would hear the name as something like Trusty.

Count how many of those words you could have guessed. Domus is behind domestic. Magna is behind magnify. Familia gave us family. Habitat is an English word already, and it means exactly what it means here: it lives, it dwells. That is the deal Latin offers an English speaker. You are not starting from zero; you are starting from about a third of the way in.

The point: Latin spelling is regular in a way English spelling is not. Learn the sound of each letter once and you can read any Latin word aloud correctly, even a word you have never seen and cannot translate.

Twenty-three letters, and two that are missing

The Latin alphabet of the classical period had 23 letters. Two of yours are simply absent: there is no j and no w. Two more do double duty. The letter i is sometimes a vowel and sometimes the consonant we write as y; the letter v is sometimes the vowel u and sometimes a consonant. A Roman stonecutter carving Caesar's name cut IVLIVS, which is the name we spell Julius. The letters y and z turn up almost only in words borrowed from Greek.

Modern textbooks, including this one, print u and v as separate letters because it is easier on the eye. When you meet a Roman inscription in a museum, remember that the V standing in for U is not a mistake or a decoration: it is the alphabet the Romans actually had.

Five vowels, each one twice

Every Latin vowel comes in a short form and a long form, and the difference is real: it is a difference of duration, roughly a beat against two beats. Modern editions mark the long value with a macron, a flat bar over the letter.

Why should you care about a bar over a letter? Because vowel length does grammatical work. Later in this course the word puella with a short final a will be the girl doing something, while puellā with a long final a will be the girl something is done with. Same five letters, different job. Get in the habit now of hearing the bar.

The Romans did not write macrons. Occasionally a stonecutter marked a long vowel with a small stroke called an apex, but ordinary writing left length to the reader's ear, the way English leaves the difference between read the present and read the past to yours. Macrons are a teaching aid invented for learners, and this course uses them in every Latin word, table and reading passage so that you always know what you are hearing.

Three blends worth knowing on sight

A diphthong is two vowel letters run together into one syllable. Latin has three common ones.

Anything else is two separate syllables. Poēta (poet) is three syllables, po-E-ta, because oe here is not the diphthong: the macron on the e shows it belongs to its own syllable. A diphthong always counts as long for the stress rule below.

The consonants that will trip you

Most Latin consonants sound the way you expect. Six do not, and they are the six that decide whether you sound like a reader of Latin or a reader of English words in fancy dress.

• c is always hard, like the k of kitchen. Cicero called himself KIH-ke-roh. There is no soft c in classical Latin, ever.
• g is always hard, like the g of go. gemma (jewel) begins GEM, not JEM.
• v has the sound of English w. vīnum (wine) is WEE-num, and Julius Caesar wrote WAY-nee, WEE-dee, WEE-kee for what we quote as veni, vidi, vici.
• i before a vowel is a consonant with the sound of English y. iānua (door) is YAH-noo-a, which is why the Roman doorkeeper, the iānitor, is the ancestor of your school's janitor.
• s always hisses, as in sit, never buzzes as in rose. rosa is ROH-sa.
• r is tapped or rolled with the tip of the tongue, as in Spanish or Italian.

Three combinations finish the set. qu is kw, so aqua is AH-kwa. x is ks, so rēx (king) is rayks. Doubled consonants are actually held twice as long, so annus (year) keeps both n sounds and does not collapse into ānus, which means ring and is a word you would rather not confuse with year. And h is a light breath, weak enough that Romans themselves kept dropping it in speech.

Where the beat falls

English stress is unpredictable: PHOtograph, phoTOGraphy. Latin stress is a rule you can apply to a word you have never seen. Allen and Greenough state it in two lines: a word of two syllables is stressed on the first, and a longer word is stressed on the next-to-last syllable if that syllable is long, otherwise on the one before it.

The next-to-last syllable has a name, the penult, and the one before it is the antepenult. A penult counts as long, or heavy, when it holds a long vowel, or a diphthong, or when it ends in a consonant. So the whole procedure is four steps.

1. Split the word into syllables: every vowel or diphthong makes one. A single consonant between vowels goes with the following vowel; two consonants usually split.
2. If there are exactly two syllables, stress the first and stop.
3. Otherwise look at the penult. Long vowel, diphthong, or closed by a consonant? Stress it.
4. If the penult is short and open, step back one and stress the antepenult.

Run it on three words from the opening passage. fēmina splits fe-mi-na; the penult mi has a short i and ends in a vowel, so the stress retreats: FAY-mih-na. magister (teacher) splits ma-gis-ter; the penult gis ends in a consonant, so it takes the stress: ma-GIS-ter. Valeria splits Va-le-ri-a; the penult ri is short and open, so the antepenult takes it: va-LEH-ri-a.

Notice what just happened. You placed the stress on three words without knowing what two of them meant. Pronunciation in Latin is a mechanical skill, and it is finished in one lesson; nothing else in this course is.

The other Latin you have heard

If you have sung in a choir, you have heard Latin pronounced differently, and the difference is not a mistake. Ecclesiastical Latin, the Latin of the Roman church, took on the sound of Italian over the centuries that followed the empire. The main differences are easy to list.

Neither system is the real one and the other a corruption. Classical Latin is a reconstruction of how educated Romans spoke around the first century BC, built from spelling mistakes in graffiti, from Roman writers describing their own language, from how Greeks transliterated Latin names, and from what the Romance languages later did with the sounds. Church Latin is a genuine later tradition with a thousand years of use behind it. This course uses the classical sounds, because the Latin you will read is the Latin of Cicero's century.

Roman life: what was behind that doorway

The mosaic dog was not decoration for its own sake. It sat in the vestibulum, the entrance passage of a domus, the town house of a family with money. A visitor stepped off a noisy street, passed the warning, and came into the atrium, a high room open to the sky in the middle, with a shallow basin in the floor to catch rainwater. Around it were small rooms, and beyond it the garden. Most Romans never lived in anything like this; the crowded apartment blocks of Rome held far more people. Our family, the Valerii, have a domus, and you will walk through it in the next few lessons.

English that came out of this lesson

• canis, dog: canine, and the Canary Islands, named in antiquity for their dogs.
• iānua, door, and iānitor, doorkeeper: janitor, and January, the month that opens the door of the year.
• domus, house: domestic, domicile.
• fēmina, woman: feminine, female (through Latin femella, a little woman).
• puer, boy: puerile, meaning childish.
• vir, man: virile, and through virtūs, virtue.
• sedet, sits: sedentary, sediment, session.
• magna, big: magnify, magnitude, magnate.

Common misconceptions

• Latin is dead, so nobody can know how it sounded. Its sounds are reconstructed from evidence: misspellings scratched on walls by people writing what they heard, Roman grammarians describing the position of the tongue, Greek spellings of Latin names, Latin loanwords in other languages, and the regular changes that produced Italian, Spanish and French. The reconstruction is an argument from data, not a guess.
• A macron marks the stress. It marks duration only. Stress is decided separately by the penult rule, and the two often fall on different syllables.
• Church Latin is Latin done wrong. It is Latin as it came to be pronounced in Italy centuries later, and it is used by living institutions today. Classical and ecclesiastical pronunciation fit different repertoires.
• Caesar sounds like SEE-zer. That is English. In Latin it is KAI-sar, which is why the German Kaiser and the Russian tsar, both taken from the name, begin with a k sound.

What to carry forward

• Twenty-three letters, no j and no w; i and v each serve as both vowel and consonant.
• Every vowel is short or long; the macron marks the long one, and length will later change grammar, not just sound.
• c and g are always hard, v is w, i before a vowel is y, s always hisses, qu is kw, x is ks.
• Two syllables: stress the first. More: stress the penult if it is long or closed, otherwise the antepenult.
• Ecclesiastical Latin softens c and g, says v as v, and flattens ae to e; it is a later tradition, not an error.

Sources

1. Allen, J. H., and Greenough, J. B. (2014). Pronunciation. In M. Ayer (Ed.), Allen and Greenough's New Latin Grammar for Schools and Colleges. Dickinson College Commentaries. dcc.dickinson.edu
2. Allen, J. H., and Greenough, J. B. (2014). Accents (section 12). In M. Ayer (Ed.), Allen and Greenough's New Latin Grammar. Dickinson College Commentaries. dcc.dickinson.edu
3. Wikipedia contributors. (n.d.). Latin spelling and pronunciation. Wikipedia. en.wikipedia.org
4. Wikipedia contributors. (n.d.). House of the Tragic Poet. Wikipedia. en.wikipedia.org
5. Allen, W. S. (1978). Vox Latina: A Guide to the Pronunciation of Classical Latin (2nd ed.). Cambridge University Press.

A sentence that will not stay in order

The best known opening line in Latin was written by Julius Caesar in the 50s BC, at the head of his despatches from the Gallic Wars: Gallia est omnis dīvīsa in partēs trēs. Lay English words under the Latin ones in the order they arrive and you get this: Gaul is all divided into parts three. Nobody says that. In English it has to be: all Gaul is divided into three parts. Two words had to move before the sentence would work at all.

They had to move because English decides a word's job by where you put it, and Latin does not. That is the one fact this lesson exists to hand you. Everything else in the course stands on top of it.

Four sentences, one meaning

Back to the house of the Valerii. Marcus is shouting for his sister across the atrium.

Mārcus Valeriam vocat. Marcus calls Valeria.

Now watch what happens when the words are shuffled. Every one of these says the same thing:

• Mārcus Valeriam vocat.
• Valeriam Mārcus vocat.
• Vocat Mārcus Valeriam.
• Valeriam vocat Mārcus.

All four mean Marcus calls Valeria. Not one of them can be made to mean Valeria calls Marcus, however you arrange them, because Mārcus ends in -us and Valeriam ends in -am, and those two endings have already handed out the parts.

So how do you make Valeria do the calling? You do not move anything. You change two letters:

Mārcum Valeria vocat. Valeria calls Marcus.

Reversing who calls whom costs English a rebuild of the whole sentence. It costs Latin the end of two words.

What matters here: in Latin the ending is the grammar. Word order still does real work, but the work it does is emphasis and rhythm, not who did what to whom.

The subject case and the object case

Each shape a Latin noun can take is called a case. Latin has six, and you will meet them one at a time over the next module. Two of them you have just used without being told their names.

The nominative is the case of the subject: whoever or whatever is doing the verb. Allen and Greenough say it in nine words, and there is nothing to add: the nominative is the case of the subject. Mārcus is nominative in the first four sentences above, and Valeria is nominative in the fifth.

The accusative is the case of the direct object: whoever or whatever the verb lands on. Valeriam is accusative in the first four, Mārcum in the fifth. The test is simple. Say the verb, then ask whom or what. If the sentence answers, the answer is accusative.

The word accusative is a bad name and it is worth knowing why, so that you stop expecting it to mean something. It is the Roman rendering of a Greek grammatical term, aitiātikē, which could be read either as the case of the thing accused or as the case of the thing caused. The Romans took the first reading, the name stuck, and the case has never had anything to do with accusing anybody.

Two families of endings

Latin nouns fall into families called declensions, and each family spells the six cases its own way. Two families cover most of what you will read this month, and you have already had words from both: puella and Valeria from one, servus and Mārcus from the other.

Read down each column and listen. The first family marks its object with -m in the singular and a long -ās in the plural. The second marks its object with -m in the singular too, and a long -ōs in the plural. The -m is the oldest signal in the system, and it will follow you into every declension in this course.

One more piece and you can read sentences with more than one person in them. A Latin verb announces at its own end whether its subject is one or many: -t for one, -nt for more than one. Puella rosam portat is the girl carries a rose. Puellae rosās portant is the girls carry roses. Every word in that sentence changed its ending and not one of them changed its meaning.

Three steps, and six sentences worked through

Here is the reading procedure. It is the same one you will still be using in Latin IV.

1. Find the verb. In Latin prose it is usually, though not always, at or near the end. Its ending tells you whether one person or several are acting.
2. Find the nominative. That is your subject, wherever in the line it happens to sit.
3. Find the accusative, if there is one. That is what the verb lands on.
4. Only now put it into English word order.

Work these with the procedure rather than by guessing from the order.

• Claudia rosās portat. The verb portat is singular, so one person is carrying. Claudia is nominative. Rosās is accusative plural. Claudia carries roses.
• Rosās Claudia portat. Three identical words with three identical endings, so it is the same sentence: Claudia carries roses. Putting rosās first leans the sentence on the roses, the way an English speaker might say it is roses she is carrying.
• Syra cibum parat. Syra prepares the food. Cibus is food; cibum is the food being prepared.
• Dāvus iānuam spectat. Davus watches the door. The doorkeeper's whole job in one sentence.
• Fīdus Mārcum amat. Fidus loves Marcus.
• Fīdum Mārcus amat. Marcus loves Fidus. The two names swapped endings and nothing else happened, so the affection now runs the other way.

Now one with a trap in it. Mārcus et Valeria Fīdum vocant. The verb is vocant, plural, so look for more than one nominative: Mārcus and Valeria, joined by et, and. Fīdum is accusative. Marcus and Valeria call Fidus. If you had read the last two words first and stopped, you would have had the dog calling somebody.

Where Caesar actually put his verbs

People often say Latin puts the verb last, and then a learner meets a sentence that does not and decides the rule was a lie. Here is the honest version, with numbers. Harm Pinkster counted 568 sentences in Caesar that contain a subject, an object and a verb all three. Sixty-three percent of them ran subject, object, verb. Twenty-one percent ran object, subject, verb. Only four percent used the English order of subject, verb, object.

The habit also varies by writer and by the kind of clause. An older count by Linde in 1923 found 84 percent of Caesar's main clauses ending in the verb, against 35 percent in Cicero's dē Rē Pūblicā. Pinkster himself argued in 1990 that there is no good reason to call any one order basic in Classical Latin. So: the verb at the end is a strong habit of Caesar's plain military prose, not a law of the language, and you should expect to find it elsewhere.

The upshot: let the endings decide the meaning and let the order tell you what the writer wanted you to notice first.

What a Latin dictionary hands you

Look up girl in a Latin dictionary and you get three things, not one: puella, puellae, f. The first form is the nominative singular, the form you would use as a subject. The second form is there to show which family the word belongs to, and it has a job of its own that you will learn in Module 2. The letter is the word's gender: f. for feminine, m. for masculine, n. for neuter.

So servus, servī, m. is a second family word and masculine. Canis, canis, m. or f. belongs to neither of today's families; it is from a third, larger one that waits until Module 5, which is why canem in the Pompeian mosaic did not fit either pattern above.

Gender in Latin is grammatical, not biological. Mēnsa, a table, is feminine. Hortus, a garden, is masculine. Nothing about a table is womanly; the word simply belongs to a class, and it matters because adjectives will have to match it.

Roman life: whose house this is

Gaius Valerius has two names because Roman men of citizen families normally did. Gaius is the praenomen, the personal name given in infancy, chosen from a very short list: about three dozen were in use in the early Republic, and only about a dozen were still common in the first century AD, which is why so many Romans in your reading are called Gaius, Marcus, Lucius, Publius or Quintus. Valerius is the nomen, the name of the gens or clan. Many families added a third name, the cognomen, first as a nickname and later by inheritance: Quintus Fabius Maximus Verrucosus carried one branch name and one that meant warty.

Gaius Valerius is also the pater familias, and that phrase names a legal office, not a mood. The patria potestas, the father's power, put his wife, his children, his freedmen and the enslaved members of the house, along with the house's property, under his authority. In early law it reached in principle to a power of life and death, one that the Twelve Tables already regulated and that later emperors cut down: under Hadrian a father who killed his son lost his citizenship, lost his property and was exiled for good.

Keep one thing straight from the first week. Davus and Syra are enslaved, not employed. The word familia did not begin by meaning the people you love; it began as the word for the famulī, the household's slaves, and widened out from there. When you meet servus in a reading, translate it as enslaved man, and let the sentence be as uncomfortable as it was.

English that came out of this lesson

• vocat, calls, from vocō: vocal, vocation, invoke, vocabulary.
• portat, carries, from portō: portable, transport, export, porter.
• spectat, watches, from spectō: spectator, spectacle, inspect.
• parat, prepares, from parō: prepare, apparatus, repair.
• amat, loves, from amō: amateur, one who does a thing for love of it, and amiable.
• servus, enslaved man: servile, serf.
• aqua, water: aquarium, aquatic, aqueduct.
• rosa, rose: rose itself, and rosary, first a rose garden.
• pars, partēs, part: partition, particle, apart.

Common misconceptions

• Latin word order is random, so you can ignore it. Two thirds of Caesar's three-part sentences run subject, object, verb, and a writer who breaks the habit is usually doing it on purpose. Order does not decide meaning; it does decide emphasis.
• A word ending in -m must be the object. True often enough to be dangerous. Bellum, war, ends in -m and is perfectly happy as a subject, and the accusative plural of the first family ends in -ās, not in -m at all. Read the whole word, not the last letter.
• Puella and puellam are two different words. They are one word wearing two hats. A dictionary lists them once.
• You can translate Latin left to right, one word at a time. Try that on Caesar's opening line and you get Gaul is all divided into parts three. Find the verb, then the nominative, then the accusative, and only then reach for English.

The short version

• Latin marks a word's job with its ending; English marks it with position.
• Nominative is the subject case. Accusative is the direct object case.
• First family: puella, puellam, puellae, puellās. Second family: servus, servum, servī, servōs.
• A verb in -t has one subject; a verb in -nt has more than one.
• Read verb first, then nominative, then accusative, then rebuild it in English.
• A dictionary entry gives two forms and a gender letter, and all three are information you need.

Sources

1. Allen, J. H., and Greenough, J. B. (2014). Construction of cases (section 338). In M. Ayer (Ed.), Allen and Greenough's New Latin Grammar for Schools and Colleges. Dickinson College Commentaries. dcc.dickinson.edu
2. Caesar, C. Julius. (n.d.). Commentarii de Bello Gallico, Book 1, chapter 1. The Latin Library. thelatinlibrary.com
3. Wikipedia contributors. (n.d.). Latin word order. Wikipedia. en.wikipedia.org
4. Wikipedia contributors. (n.d.). Roman naming conventions. Wikipedia. en.wikipedia.org
5. Wikipedia contributors. (n.d.). Pater familias. Wikipedia. en.wikipedia.org

Three Latin words, five English ones

Some time in the 50s BC the poet Catullus opened a poem two lines long with three words: Ōdī et amō. To say the same thing English needs five: I hate and I love. Latin needed two verbs and the word for and, because a Latin verb keeps its subject inside itself. The -ō on the end of amō is the I. Nowhere in the line is there a separate word for I, and no Roman reader felt anything was missing.

That is the second great economy of the language, after the one you learned last lesson. A Latin noun tells you its job with its ending. A Latin verb tells you who is doing it with its ending. Between them, the two habits let Latin say in three words what English says in five, and they are the reason Latin fits on a coin.

A morning in the house of the Valerii

Read this before you learn anything new. You already know more of it than you think. New words are glossed underneath.

Gāius Valerius in ātriō ambulat. Syra cēnam parat. Dāvus aquam portat. Mārcus et Valeria in hortō cantant. Fīdus lātrat. Claudia puerum vocat: "Cūr nōn labōrās? Semper cantās, nōn labōrās!"

Word by word: Gaius Valerius is walking in the atrium. Syra is preparing the dinner. Davus is carrying water. Marcus and Valeria are singing in the garden. Fidus is barking. Claudia calls the boy: why are you not working? You are always singing, you are not working.

Glosses: ātrium the hall of the house, cēna dinner, hortus garden, lātrat barks, labōrās you work, cūr why, semper always, nōn not.

Count the verbs: ambulat, parat, portat, cantant, lātrat, vocat, labōrās, cantās. Eight verbs and not one word for he, she, they or you in the whole paragraph. Every one of those eight said its own subject out loud, at its own end.

Six endings, and they never change

Latin has one set of person endings for the active voice, and once you know them you know them for every regular verb in every one of the four families, present, past and future alike. Allen and Greenough give them in section 163. They are worth memorising today and never learning again.

English lost this machinery almost entirely. Of walk, walk, walks, walk, walk, walk, only one form out of six tells you anything. Latin keeps all six distinct, which is why Latin can drop the pronoun and English cannot.

Building the whole verb, one step at a time

Take the verb Catullus used. Its dictionary entry is amō, amāre, to love. The second form, the infinitive, is where the work starts. Cut the -re off amāre and you are left with amā-. That is the present stem, and the vowel at the end of it, a long ā, is the badge of the first conjugation. Any verb whose infinitive ends in -āre belongs to this family, and there are thousands of them.

Now glue the six endings onto amā-.

Two details in that table are not accidents, and if nobody points them out you will spend a year wondering whether you have miscopied something.

Where did the stem vowel go in amō? It was swallowed. Amā- plus -ō gives amō, not amaō; the long ā and the ō ran together long before anybody wrote the language down. Every first conjugation verb does this, so the I form of any -āre verb ends in a bare -ō.

Why is the a short in amat and amant but long everywhere else? Because Latin shortened a long vowel that stood in front of a final -t, and in front of -nt anywhere. So you get long amās, amāmus, amātis, but short amat and amant. It is a sound law, not a spelling exception, and it will be true of every verb you meet.

One Latin form, three English tenses

English has three ways to speak about now. Marcus works. Marcus is working. Marcus does work. They are not interchangeable: the second says he is at it right this minute, the third argues with somebody who said he was idle. Latin has one form, labōrat, and it covers all three.

This means translation asks you to choose. In Mārcus in hortō cantat, the natural English is Marcus is singing in the garden, because it is happening now. In Mārcus semper cantat, the natural English is Marcus always sings, because it is a habit. In Mārcus nōn labōrat, if Claudia is contradicting somebody, Marcus does not work. The Latin did not change. Your English has to.

Key idea: the Latin present is wider than any one English present. Read the sentence, decide whether it means now, usually, or indeed, and then pick the English that says it.

Saying no, and saying it is you

To make a Latin verb negative, put nōn in front of it. Nōn labōrō is I am not working. Dāvus nōn cantat is Davus is not singing. There is no equivalent of the English do in do not; the verb needs no help.

Latin does have words for I and you, ego and tū, but it uses them only when it wants the weight. Labōrō is I am working. Ego labōrō is I am the one who is working, said by somebody who has been watching everyone else sit down. A pronoun in a Latin sentence is almost always a raised voice. You will meet the full set in Module 3.

Twelve verbs to own by the end of the week

Every verb in this list is first conjugation, so every one of them behaves exactly like amō. The right-hand column is there because you already know half of them in English.

Six sentences, worked

• Puellae in viā ambulant. The verb ends in -nt, so the subject is plural: the girls are walking in the street. Via is a road or street, and it is the via of viaduct.
• Cūr clāmās? The -s is you, one person. Why are you shouting? There is no noun in the sentence at all, and it does not need one.
• Nōn errāmus. The -mus is we. We are not going astray. A traveller might mean it about a road; Cicero would mean it about an argument.
• Dāvus et Syra labōrant; Mārcus cantat. Two subjects share the first verb, so it is plural; the second verb has one subject and is singular. Davus and Syra are working; Marcus is singing.
• Claudia fīliam laudat. Nominative Claudia, accusative fīliam, from fīlia, daughter. Claudia praises her daughter.
• Rogō, nōn clāmō. Two verbs, both first person, no subject word anywhere. I am asking, I am not shouting.

Roman life: the schoolroom before dawn

Somewhere near where you are imagining the Valerii, a boy of nine is chanting endings exactly as you have been. Roman primary teaching happened in a lūdus, a word that also meant game, run by a litterātor or lūdī magister who was paid badly and might hold class in a rented room or under an awning in the street. Pupils moved from letters to syllables to word lists and then to memorising and reciting whole passages. Both boys and girls were taught, though not always together, and by nine to twelve a wealthy boy moved on to a grammaticus for literature.

We know what the neighbours thought of it. Martial, writing in the 90s AD, devotes an entire epigram to complaining about the schoolmaster next door. He calls him the wretched master of a school, a head hated by boys and girls alike, and says that the crested cocks have not yet broken the silence while the man is already thundering with savage muttering and with beatings. The neighbours, he adds, are not asking for the whole night; just some of it. Then he asks the teacher how much he would need to be paid to keep quiet.

Two things in that poem are worth keeping. School started before first light, and the beating was so ordinary that it belongs in the same line as the noise. Roman education ran on memory and on the cane.

Common misconceptions

• Amo means love, so it should be translated love. It means I love. The subject is not optional decoration; it is baked into the -ō. A translation that leaves out the I has lost a word.
• Latin leaves out the pronoun because Romans were being brief. Latin leaves it out because the ending already says it. When a Roman does write ego or tū, it is for emphasis or contrast, and a good translation shows that emphasis.
• Amat can only mean he loves. It equally means she loves or it loves, and the sentence around it decides which. English forces you to choose a gender that the Latin never specified.
• The macron in amāmus but not amat means the two verbs come from different roots. Same root, same stem. A long vowel simply shortens in front of a final -t and in front of -nt.

English that came out of this lesson

• ambulō, walk: amble, preamble, and ambulance, from a French military hospital that walked with the army.
• cantō, sing: chant, cantata, incantation, enchant, and the descant above a hymn tune.
• clāmō, shout: exclaim, proclaim, clamour, claimant.
• errō, wander: error, erratic, errand in the sense of a knight errant, and aberration.
• labōrō, work: labour, laboratory, elaborate, collaborate.
• rogō, ask: interrogate, derogatory, and prerogative, first the right of a Roman group to be asked its vote first.
• nāvigō, sail: navigate, navigable, and navy, through nāvis, a ship.
• lūdus, school and game: ludicrous, interlude, prelude, allude.

Putting it together

• A Latin verb carries its subject in its ending, so a pronoun is usually unnecessary and always emphatic.
• The active person endings are -ō, -s, -t, -mus, -tis, -nt, and they never change.
• An infinitive in -āre marks the first conjugation; drop the -re to get the stem.
• amō, amās, amat, amāmus, amātis, amant. Say it until it is automatic.
• One Latin present covers I love, I am loving and I do love, and you choose in English.
• Nōn goes in front of the verb and needs no helper.

Sources

1. Allen, J. H., and Greenough, J. B. (2014). Personal endings (section 163). In M. Ayer (Ed.), Allen and Greenough's New Latin Grammar for Schools and Colleges. Dickinson College Commentaries. dcc.dickinson.edu
2. Allen, J. H., and Greenough, J. B. (2014). First conjugation (section 184). In M. Ayer (Ed.), Allen and Greenough's New Latin Grammar. Dickinson College Commentaries. dcc.dickinson.edu
3. Catullus, G. Valerius. (n.d.). Carmina 85. The Latin Library. thelatinlibrary.com
4. Martial. (n.d.). Epigrammata 9.68. The Latin Library. thelatinlibrary.com
5. Wikipedia contributors. (n.d.). Education in ancient Rome. Wikipedia. en.wikipedia.org

A birthday invitation from the edge of the empire

In March 1973, at the Roman fort of Vindolanda just south of where Hadrian's Wall would later run, the archaeologist Robin Birley pulled out of the wet ground a sheaf of thin wooden leaves about the size of a postcard, written on in carbon ink. One of them, written around AD 100, begins like this:

Claudia Sevēra Lepidīnae suae salūtem. Claudia Severa to her own Lepidina, greeting.

Severa was inviting her friend Sulpicia Lepidina, the wife of the fort's commander Flavius Cerialis, to a birthday party on the eleventh of September. The last lines are in Severa's own handwriting rather than a secretary's, which makes them, as far as anyone knows, the oldest surviving piece of Latin written by a woman.

Now look at the two names. Sevēra ends in -a. Lepidīnae ends in -ae. Severa is doing the writing; Lepidina is the one written to. That single difference of ending is the whole subject of this lesson, and every word in this lesson belongs to the same family as those two names.

What English threw away

An English noun has almost no case left. Girl, girl's, girls, girls': four written forms, and two of them sound identical. A thousand years ago English had more, and you can still see the wreckage in the pronouns, where he, him and his are three cases of one word and nobody thinks that strange.

Latin kept the whole apparatus. A noun has six cases and two numbers, twelve slots in all, and although some of the slots are spelled alike, you always know which one you are looking at because the sentence tells you. Here is the family Claudia Severa's name belongs to, the first declension, in full.

Say it aloud in that order, down the singular column and then down the plural, and keep saying it until it runs by itself. Roman schoolchildren chanted exactly this, and the reason the method survived two thousand years is that it works.

The six cases, one sentence each

A grid is a summary of things that happen in sentences. Here are the sentences.

• Nominative. Puella cantat. The girl is singing. The nominative is the doer.
• Genitive. Fīlia agricolae in silvā ambulat. The farmer's daughter is walking in the wood. Agricolae hangs on fīlia and tells you whose daughter she is. Where English writes an apostrophe or the word of, Latin changes the ending.
• Dative. Valeria fābulam puellae narrat. Valeria tells a story to the girl. The dative is the person the action is aimed at or done for.
• Accusative. Claudia fīliam vocat. Claudia calls her daughter. The accusative is what the verb lands on.
• Ablative. Syra culīnam aquā purgat. Syra cleans the kitchen with water. The ablative here answers with what, and it is the case that will keep turning up for by, with, from and in.
• Vocative. Valeria, cūr cantās? Valeria, why are you singing? In this declension the vocative simply copies the nominative, so it costs you nothing to learn. The next lesson has one that does not.

Worth holding on to: a case is not a piece of decoration attached to a noun. It is the answer to a question the sentence is asking: who, whose, to whom, whom, by what means, and who are you talking to.

The puellae problem, and how Romans lived with it

Look back at the grid. The form puellae shows up three times: genitive singular, dative singular, and nominative plural. A beginner reads this as a design flaw. It is not, because a sentence never leaves you with three live options.

• Puellae cantant. The verb is cantant, plural. Only a plural subject can go with it, so puellae is nominative plural: the girls are singing.
• Fīlia puellae cantat. The verb is singular, and fīlia is already sitting there as the nominative. A second nominative has nowhere to go, so puellae must be genitive: the girl's daughter is singing.
• Valeria rosam puellae dat. Now there is a nominative, Valeria, and an accusative, rosam, and a verb of giving. Dat means gives. Give something to somebody: puellae is dative. Valeria gives a rose to the girl.

The method is always the same. Find the verb and its number, find the nominative, and then ask what is left over and what the sentence still needs. Ambiguity is rarer in real Latin than it looks in a grid.

Not every -a word is a woman

Nouns of the first declension are feminine, with one exception that is worth taking seriously: nouns that are masculine because of what they mean. Allen and Greenough put it exactly that way. A sailor, a farmer and a poet were male occupations in Roman life, so nauta, agricola and poēta are masculine nouns even though they decline like puella.

The usual list is short: agricola farmer, nauta sailor, poēta poet, pīrāta pirate, scrība clerk, incola inhabitant. The endings do not change one letter. What changes is what an adjective has to do with them, which is why you are being told now rather than in Module 2's last lesson: the good farmer is bonus agricola, not bona agricola.

Three small irregularities you will actually meet

Allen and Greenough collect these in section 43, and all three turn up in real texts.

• Fīlia and dea (goddess) take -ābus in the dative and ablative plural, giving fīliābus and deābus. The reason is practical: fīliīs and deīs would be identical to the forms of fīlius, son, and deus, god, and a will leaving property to daughters had better not be read as leaving it to sons.
• An old genitive singular in -ās survives frozen inside one phrase you have already met: pater familiās, father of a household. The modern genitive would be familiae, but the legal formula kept the ancient ending.
• Names of towns use a leftover case, the locative, to say where. Rōmae means at Rome. It is spelled like the genitive and the dative, and it is neither.

A word-hoard for the house

Every noun here is first declension and feminine unless marked. Learn them as they are printed, with the second form, because that is what a dictionary gives you.

Two of those deserve a second look. Trivial comes from trivium, the place where three roads meet, because what gets said at a street corner is not important. Villain is the person attached to a vīlla, a farm labourer, and the word slid from low-born to wicked over several centuries of people with money writing the dictionaries.

Reading: the women of the house

Claudia est domina. In vīllā habitat. Syra et ancillae in culīnā labōrant; cēnam dominae parant. Valeria, fīlia Claudiae, epistulam amīcae scrībit. Fābulās nautārum et poētārum amat. Claudia fīliam laudat: "Epistulae tuae sunt longae!"

Word for word: Claudia is the mistress of the house. She lives in the villa. Syra and the enslaved women are working in the kitchen; they are preparing dinner for the mistress. Valeria, Claudia's daughter, is writing a letter to her friend. She loves the stories of sailors and of poets. Claudia praises her daughter: your letters are long!

Track the cases. Dominae in the third sentence is dative, dinner for the mistress. Claudiae in the fourth is genitive, Claudia's daughter. Amīcae is dative again, a letter to her friend. Nautārum and poētārum are genitive plural, the stories of sailors and poets. Fīliam is accusative. Six words, five different jobs, and you can tell them apart.

Roman life: the mistress of the house, and a letter she wrote herself

The domina ran the household: the stores, the accounts, the enslaved staff, the weaving. Wool work was the emblem of the respectable Roman matron, and Roman epitaphs praise women in a formula that has come down to us over and over again, that she kept the house and worked the wool. It is worth noticing what the formula leaves out and who wrote it.

The Vindolanda letters cut across that formula, which is why they matter so much. They are not a man's summary of what a good woman did. Sulpicia Lepidina, married to the prefect of the ninth cohort of Batavians, received letters from Claudia Severa, married to a commander at a nearby fort, and the two women called each other sister although they were not related. Severa dictated most of her letter to a scribe and then added the closing greeting in her own hand. It is the only piece of her handwriting in existence, and it survived because it was thrown on a rubbish heap in a wet northern fort where the ground happened to keep it. Whole libraries of Roman prose were copied and recopied because somebody thought them worth the effort; this survived because nobody did.

Common misconceptions

• Puellae must mean girls. It is equally the genitive singular and the dative singular. Read the verb and the rest of the sentence before you decide.
• The genitive is just the apostrophe-s of English. That is its commonest use, but it also covers of in almost every sense, and Latin uses it in places English would never use an apostrophe, such as descriptions of quality and quantity.
• Everything in the first declension is feminine. Words that are masculine by meaning, such as nauta, agricola and poēta, are masculine nouns with feminine-looking endings, and their adjectives must be masculine.
• The macron on puellā is a pronunciation nicety. It is the only thing separating the nominative from the ablative. In a text without macrons the word order and the sense have to do that work, which is exactly why editors of school texts put the macrons in.

English that came out of this lesson

• epistula, letter: epistle, epistolary, a novel written in letters.
• fābula, story: fable, fabulous, confabulate.
• īnsula, island: insular, insulate, peninsula, which is almost an island.
• terra, land: terrain, terrestrial, subterranean, Mediterranean, the sea in the middle of the land.
• via, road: viaduct, deviate, obvious, something standing in the road in front of you, and trivial.
• silva, wood: sylvan, and Pennsylvania, Penn's woods.
• agricola, farmer: agriculture, agrarian.
• nauta, sailor: nautical, astronaut, a sailor of the stars, and nausea, which began as seasickness.
• lūna, moon: lunar, and lunatic, from the old belief that the moon disturbed the mind.

What you now know

• The first declension in full: puella, puellae, puellae, puellam, puellā, puella; then puellae, puellārum, puellīs, puellās, puellīs, puellae.
• Nominative does, genitive owns, dative receives, accusative is acted on, ablative is the by and with case, vocative is addressed.
• Puellae has three jobs, and the verb plus the rest of the sentence decides which.
• These nouns are feminine unless the word means a man: nauta, agricola, poēta.
• Fīliābus and deābus exist to stay out of the way of fīliīs and deīs.

Sources

1. Allen, J. H., and Greenough, J. B. (2014). First declension: stem, paradigm and gender (sections 40-42). In M. Ayer (Ed.), Allen and Greenough's New Latin Grammar for Schools and Colleges. Dickinson College Commentaries. dcc.dickinson.edu
2. Allen, J. H., and Greenough, J. B. (2014). First declension: case forms (section 43). In M. Ayer (Ed.), Allen and Greenough's New Latin Grammar. Dickinson College Commentaries. dcc.dickinson.edu
3. Wikipedia contributors. (n.d.). Claudia Severa. Wikipedia. en.wikipedia.org
4. Wikipedia contributors. (n.d.). Vindolanda tablets. Wikipedia. en.wikipedia.org
5. Wiktionary contributors. (n.d.). filia. Wiktionary. en.wiktionary.org

Three words Caesar almost certainly never said

Everyone knows what Julius Caesar said on 15 March 44 BC as the knives came out: Et tu, Brute? You too, Brutus? The line was written by William Shakespeare in 1599, and it had already appeared in a Latin play at Oxford in 1582. Suetonius, writing about a century and a half after the murder, says Caesar died without a word, though some people reported that when Marcus Brutus rushed at him he said, in Greek, kai su, teknon: you too, child. Plutarch says only that Caesar pulled his toga over his head when he saw Brutus among them.

So the most famous Latin sentence about Caesar is a piece of Elizabethan theatre. What makes it worth two minutes of a Latin lesson is the shape of one word in it. The man's name was Brūtus. Shakespeare wrote Brūte, because in Latin you do not call a man by the same form of his name that you use to talk about him. That change of ending is a case, the vocative, and second declension nouns in -us are the only words in the entire language where it looks different from the nominative.

Dawn at the door of Gaius Valerius

Prīma hōra est. Gāius Valerius in ātriō stat. Dāvus iānuam spectat. Amīcī in viā clāmant: "Salvē, domine!" Gāius respondet: "Salvēte, amīcī!" Mārcus quoque adest. Amīcus puerum salūtat: "Salvē, Mārce!" Et puer respondet: "Salvē, Quīnte!"

It is the first hour of the day. Gaius Valerius is standing in the atrium. Davus is watching the door. Friends are shouting in the street: hello, master! Gaius answers: hello, friends! Marcus is here too. A friend greets the boy: hello, Marcus! And the boy answers: hello, Quintus!

Glosses: stat stands, respondet answers, adest is present, quoque also, salvē and salvēte the ordinary Roman hello, to one person and to several.

Now look at the names as they are used. The man is dominus but is called domine. The boy is Mārcus but is called Mārce. The other boy is Quīntus but is called Quīnte. The friends are amīcī and are called amīcī, unchanged, because the special vocative exists only in the singular.

The second declension, laid out

This is the family of servus, dominus, Mārcus and Brūtus: masculine nouns whose genitive singular ends in -ī. Allen and Greenough give the paradigm in sections 45 to 47.

Compare it with the first declension and notice how much is the same underneath. The genitive plural is -ārum there and -ōrum here. The dative and ablative plural are -īs in both. The accusative singular is -m in both and the accusative plural is a long vowel plus -s in both. You are not learning a second system; you are learning the same system in a different colour.

The trap in this declension is servī, which is genitive singular, nominative plural and vocative plural all at once, exactly as puellae was three things at once. The cure is the same: find the verb, find the number, see what the sentence still needs.

Boys who keep the e, fields that drop it

A second group of masculine nouns ends in -er in the nominative and then declines exactly like servus from the genitive onward. The only question is whether the e survives, and the dictionary answers it for you with the second form.

Puer keeps its e in every case; ager and magister drop it everywhere except the nominative and vocative singular. There is no rule you can apply from the outside, and no Roman had to learn one, because a Roman child heard agrī from infancy. You learn it the way you learn that English has mice and not mouses: from the dictionary entry, which is why the second form is always printed.

Vir, man, belongs here too, and keeps everything: vir, virī, virō, virum, virō, plural virī, virōrum, virīs, virōs, virīs.

The core of it: the nominative of a Latin noun is the least informative form there is. The genitive is the one that shows you the stem, and the stem is what you actually decline.

Calling someone by name

Here is the whole of the vocative, and it is shorter than you expect.

• In every declension and every number except one, the vocative is spelled exactly like the nominative. Puella, puer, amīcī, puellae: all unchanged.
• The exception is the singular of second declension nouns in -us, which change to -e. Servus becomes serve, dominus becomes domine, amīcus becomes amīce, Mārcus becomes Mārce, Brūtus becomes Brūte.
• Proper names ending in -ius take -ī instead, and, says Allen and Greenough in section 49, they keep the stress where the nominative had it. Vergilius becomes Vergilī, stressed on the same syllable as before, which breaks the penult rule you learned in the first lesson. Gāius becomes Gāī.
• Fīlius follows the same path to fīlī, and the possessive meus becomes mī. That is why the standard Latin for my son, in every Roman comedy and every later letter, is mī fīlī.
• Deus has no vocative in classical Latin at all. Writers simply use deus and get on with the prayer.

A vocative is often marked off by commas in modern printed Latin, the way English marks it: Marcus, come here. Roman texts had no commas, and readers managed.

A crowd of second declension words

Six sentences to read aloud

• Servī in agrīs labōrant. The enslaved men are working in the fields. Agrīs is ablative plural after in.
• Magister puerōs in lūdō spectat. The teacher watches the boys in the school.
• Amīcī dominī in ātriō stant. The master's friends are standing in the atrium. Dominī is genitive singular; the verb is plural, so amīcī is the subject.
• Domine, cūr nōn respondēs? Master, why do you not answer? A vocative and a second person verb.
• Equus in hortō ambulat; Fīdus lātrat. A horse is walking in the garden; Fidus is barking. You can hear the trouble coming.
• Mī fīlī, librum magistrō dā. My son, give the book to the teacher. Magistrō is dative, librum accusative, and dā is the command form you will meet properly in Module 3.

Roman life: the queue at the door

The scene at the start of this lesson is a real Roman institution, the salūtātiō. At dawn a Roman of standing received his clients in the atrium, and afterwards they walked with him to the forum. The relationship had a name at each end, patrōnus and cliēns, and it ran on obligations in both directions: the patron gave legal help, loans and backing; the client gave votes, support and, above all, presence. The size of the morning crowd was the public measure of a man's importance, which is why he wanted it large and why the clients came.

By the first century AD the ritual had curdled into something more like a queue for a handout. Juvenal, writing satire around AD 100, describes the sportula, the little dole, sitting on the front doorstep to be snatched at by a crowd in togas, and the patron inspecting each face in case a stranger claimed it. A hundred quadrantēs was the going rate, in a coin that was a quarter of an as, the small change of the empire. Juvenal watches a packed litter go after it and notices that men bring their wives, pregnant or ill, to collect a share.

Juvenal is a satirist and exaggerates for a living, so read him as evidence of what could be complained about rather than of what happened every morning at every door. What is not in dispute is the shape of the thing: Roman society ran on personal obligation between unequal people, and the working day started in somebody else's hallway.

Common misconceptions

• Caesar said Et tu, Brute. Shakespeare said it, in 1599. Suetonius reports Caesar saying nothing, and adds that some people claimed he spoke Greek, not Latin, to Brutus.
• The vocative is a whole extra case to memorise. It is one ending, -e, in one declension, in the singular, plus the -ī of names in -ius. Everywhere else it is the nominative again.
• Ager and puer are irregular. Neither is. Both decline like servus from the genitive onward. The only difference between them is whether the e of the nominative is part of the stem, and the dictionary entry tells you.
• Servi must be plural. It is also the genitive singular and the vocative plural, just as puellae was three things at once.

English that came out of this lesson

• dominus, master: dominate, dominion, domain, and the Spanish and Italian don.
• magister, teacher: magistrate, master, mister, maestro, and the magisterial tone of somebody who is sure.
• liber, book: library, and libretto, the little book of words handed out at an opera.
• annus, year: annual, anniversary, biennial, perennial, and the annals of a city, its record year by year.
• populus, people: popular, population, populace, and the SPQR on Roman standards, Senātus Populusque Rōmānus.
• ager, field: agriculture, agrarian, and pilgrim, worn down from peregrīnus, a person out beyond the fields.
• vir, man: virile, triumvirate, a board of three men, and virtue, through virtūs.
• numerus, number: numeral, enumerate, innumerable, numerous.

Where this leaves us

• Second declension masculine: servus, servī, servō, servum, servō, serve; plural servī, servōrum, servīs, servōs, servīs, servī.
• Nouns in -er either keep the e, like puer, puerī, or drop it, like ager, agrī. The genitive in the dictionary tells you which.
• The vocative is the nominative everywhere except the singular of -us nouns, which give -e, and names in -ius, which give -ī.
• Mī fīlī is my son, and it is irregular twice over.
• Servī is genitive singular, nominative plural and vocative plural; read the sentence, not the ending alone.

Sources

1. Allen, J. H., and Greenough, J. B. (2014). Second declension: stem, paradigm and gender (sections 45-47). In M. Ayer (Ed.), Allen and Greenough's New Latin Grammar for Schools and Colleges. Dickinson College Commentaries. dcc.dickinson.edu
2. Allen, J. H., and Greenough, J. B. (2014). Second declension: case forms (section 49). In M. Ayer (Ed.), Allen and Greenough's New Latin Grammar. Dickinson College Commentaries. dcc.dickinson.edu
3. Suetonius. (n.d.). Divus Iulius 82. The Latin Library. thelatinlibrary.com
4. Juvenal. (n.d.). Saturae 1, lines 94-96 and 119-121. The Latin Library. thelatinlibrary.com
5. Wikipedia contributors. (n.d.). Patronage in ancient Rome. Wikipedia. en.wikipedia.org

Two bronze pillars, and a sentence made of genitives

Augustus died in AD 14 leaving an account of his own career and instructions that it be cut on two bronze pillars outside his mausoleum in Rome. The pillars are gone. The text survives because a copy was carved on the walls of a temple at Ankara, in what is now Turkey, and it opens like this:

Rērum gestārum dīvī Augustī, quibus orbem terrārum imperiō populī Rōmānī subiēcit, ... exemplar subiectum.

Below is a copy of the achievements of the deified Augustus, by which he brought the circle of the lands under the command of the Roman people.

Now count the words meaning of. Rērum gestārum, of the things done. Dīvī Augustī, of the deified Augustus. Terrārum, of the lands. Populī Rōmānī, of the Roman people. Four of them in the first sentence of the most widely displayed inscription in the Roman world, and every one of them is doing the same grammatical job: hanging one noun onto another. That job has a case, and the case is the genitive.

A wrong answer, traced to the exact word that caused it

Here is a sentence, and here is a translation of it that a real student produced.

Perīcula magna in oppidō sunt. The student wrote: a great danger is in the town.

That answer is wrong, and it is wrong for an interesting reason. Trace it.

1. Check the verb first. Sunt means are. It is plural. A plural verb cannot have a singular subject, so before you look at anything else, the translation has already broken. Whatever the subject is, there is more than one of it.
2. Find out what misled the eye. Perīcula ends in -a, and the first noun ending in -a that this course taught you was puella, a feminine nominative singular. The shape looked familiar, and the student trusted the shape.
3. Ask the dictionary. The entry is perīculum, perīculī, n. The -um in the nominative and the -ī in the genitive put it in the second declension, and the n stands for neuter, a third gender that English lost everywhere except in the word it.
4. Apply the neuter rule. In a neuter noun the nominative plural ends in -a. So perīcula is nominative plural, magna is plural too, and the sentence means: there are great dangers in the town.

The error is not carelessness. It is the eye learning a pattern too well and applying it outside its range, which is what a beginner's eye is supposed to do. The repair is the habit of checking the verb before the nouns, and it costs you one second per sentence for the rest of your life in Latin.

Why this matters: a Latin ending is evidence, not proof. The sentence as a whole decides, and the verb is the cheapest place to start.

The neuter rule, in one line

Here is bellum, war, the standard neuter of the second declension. Allen and Greenough print it as section 46.

Everything below the top two rows is identical to servus. Only two facts are new, and they are the same two facts for every neuter noun in every declension in the language:

• The nominative, accusative and vocative are always spelled alike.
• In the plural those three always end in -a.

That is the entire neuter system. When you reach the third declension in Module 5 and meet corpus, body, with a plural corpora, you will already know the rule; only the spelling of the stem will be new.

When two neuters meet in one sentence

If the nominative and the accusative of a neuter look identical, what happens when both nouns in a sentence are neuter? Take this one.

Bellum oppidum dēlet. Dēlet means destroys.

The endings genuinely cannot tell you which noun is the subject. Bellum could be either; oppidum could be either. War destroys the town, and the town destroys war, are both grammatically available, and only one of them makes sense.

Two things settle it. First, sense: towns do not destroy wars. Second, order: Latin prose puts the subject before the object far more often than not, so a Roman reading left to right takes bellum as the subject and is rarely wrong. This is the one corner of the language where the word order rule from lesson two is doing real grammatical work rather than rhetorical work, and it is worth knowing that Romans themselves noticed the awkwardness and usually rearranged the sentence to avoid it.

What the genitive actually does

Allen and Greenough sort the genitive into half a dozen uses. Two of them cover almost everything you will meet this year.

Possession, section 343. The genitive names the owner, the parent, the author, the source. Liber puerī is the boy's book. Templum deī is the god's temple. Fābulae poētārum is the stories of the poets. English has two ways of saying this, an apostrophe and the word of, and Latin has one.

The whole, section 346. When you name a part, the whole goes in the genitive. Pars oppidī is part of the town. Multum vīnī is much of the wine, or a lot of wine. This is the use that will later explain why nihil and numbers behave the way they do.

A third use is worth naming now because it looks odd in English. A genitive can describe rather than possess: vir magnae virtūtis, a man of great courage. You will be able to build these once adjectives arrive two lessons from here.

Where does the genitive stand? Usually straight after its noun, as in templum deī. It can come first for emphasis, as rērum gestārum does in Augustus, and Latin poetry will wrap it around other words entirely. The ending does the work wherever it sits.

A neuter word-hoard

Two of those repay a second look. Templum was originally the patch of sky an augur marked off with his staff before watching for birds; to contemplate was to study what happened inside it. And negōtium, business, is literally nec ōtium, not-leisure. The Romans defined work as the absence of rest, which tells you which one they thought was the natural state.

Reading: the altar in the atrium

In ātriō Valeriōrum est āra parva. Ibi Gāius dōna deīs dat: vīnum, frūmentum, corōnās. Suprā āram stant Lārēs, duo puerī parvī cum pōculīs. Servī quoque dōna portant. Perīcula familiae multa sunt; auxilium deōrum Gāius rogat.

In the atrium of the Valerii there is a small altar. There Gaius gives gifts to the gods: wine, grain, garlands. Above the altar stand the Lares, two small boys with cups. The enslaved people bring gifts too. The dangers of the household are many; Gaius asks for the help of the gods.

Glosses: āra altar, corōna garland, suprā above, pōculum cup, ibi there, quoque also. Pick out the genitives: Valeriōrum, of the Valerii; familiae, of the household; deōrum, of the gods. Pick out the neuters: dōna, vīnum, frūmentum, pōculīs, perīcula, auxilium. Six neuter nouns in five sentences is not unusual; the gender is everywhere.

Roman life: the gods who lived in the house

The altar in that passage is the household shrine, and the excavated houses of Pompeii are full of them. In a poor house it was a niche in the wall, sometimes no more than a projecting tile against painted plaster. In a rich one it could be a miniature temple front, and it stood as often in the kitchen and the servants' quarters as in the atrium, because it belonged to the working life of the house rather than to its public display.

The standard painting shows three figures. In the middle stands the genius of the head of the house, wearing his toga pulled over his head in the way a Roman wore it to sacrifice. On either side dances a Lar, a young man in a short belted tunic, up on his toes or balanced on one leg, one arm lifting a drinking horn and the other holding a shallow dish. Underneath, a serpent moves toward an altar. The Penates guarded the food store, the penus, and so had a claim on every meal.

The offerings were domestic and cheap: grain, honey cakes and honeycomb, grapes and first fruits, wine, incense. Anything that fell on the floor during dinner belonged to the household gods, which is a rule a family with a dog would have found convenient. On big occasions a richer family killed a pig. The figures were brought to the table at family meals and were present at marriages, births and adoptions. Roman religion at home was not a matter of belief so much as of doing the right thing at the right time, in the right place, for a household that could otherwise expect trouble.

Common misconceptions

• A word ending in -a is first declension and feminine. It may equally be a neuter plural. Bella, dōna, verba and perīcula are all plural and all neuter, and the verb will usually give them away.
• Neuter means the noun refers to something lifeless. Gender in Latin is grammatical. Bellum, war, is neuter; ventus, wind, is masculine; terra, the earth, is feminine. There is nothing in the world that these labels are reporting.
• The genitive is only for ownership. It also names the whole that a part belongs to, the quality something has, and the person a feeling is aimed at. Of covers more ground in English than an apostrophe does, and the Latin genitive covers more than both.
• Bellum oppidum delet must mean war destroys the town because that is the word order. It almost certainly does, but the endings are genuinely silent here, and that matters: it is the exception that shows how much the endings normally carry.

English that came out of this lesson

• bellum, war: belligerent, one who wages war, bellicose, and antebellum, before the war.
• verbum, word: verb, verbal, verbatim, word for word, and proverb.
• signum, sign and military standard: signal, design, insignia, signature.
• dōnum, gift: donate, donor, and pardon, a gift given through and through.
• perīculum, danger: peril, perilous, imperil.
• cōnsilium, plan: counsel and council, two English words that are still confused with each other.
• imperium, command: empire, imperial, and the imperative mood, the one that gives orders.
• forum, public square: forum, and forensic, because Roman trials were held there.
• ōtium, leisure, and negōtium, its opposite: otiose and negotiate.

The takeaway

• Second declension neuter: bellum, bellī, bellō, bellum, bellō; plural bella, bellōrum, bellīs, bella, bellīs.
• In every neuter, nominative equals accusative equals vocative, and the plural of all three ends in -a.
• A word in -a is first declension singular or neuter plural; the verb usually decides.
• The genitive hangs one noun on another: the owner, the whole, the quality.
• Check the verb before you commit to a noun. It is the cheapest correction in the language.

Sources

1. Allen, J. H., and Greenough, J. B. (2014). Second declension: neuter paradigm and case forms (sections 46 and 48). In M. Ayer (Ed.), Allen and Greenough's New Latin Grammar for Schools and Colleges. Dickinson College Commentaries. dcc.dickinson.edu
2. Allen, J. H., and Greenough, J. B. (2014). The genitive case: possession (section 343) and the partitive genitive (section 346). In M. Ayer (Ed.), Allen and Greenough's New Latin Grammar. Dickinson College Commentaries. dcc.dickinson.edu
3. Augustus. (n.d.). Res Gestae Divi Augusti, preface. The Latin Library. thelatinlibrary.com
4. Wikipedia contributors. (n.d.). Res Gestae Divi Augusti. Wikipedia. en.wikipedia.org
5. Wikipedia contributors. (n.d.). Lararium. Wikipedia. en.wikipedia.org

Two letters carved at the top of thousands of graves

Walk through the Roman rooms of almost any archaeological museum and the same two letters appear at the head of gravestone after gravestone: D M. They stand for Dīs Mānibus, to the spirits of the dead. Many stones spell the phrase out and add a third word, sacrum: sacred to the spirits of the dead. Two words, no preposition anywhere, and English needs the word to in order to say it at all.

That form is the dative, and here it is in a house where nobody has died.

Claudia Valeriae rosam dat. Valeria rosam aquā servat. Deinde cum Mārcō in hortō ambulat. Fīdus puellae nōn nocet; Fīdus puellae placet.

Claudia gives a rose to Valeria. Valeria keeps the rose alive with water. Then she walks with Marcus in the garden. Fidus does not harm the girl; Fidus pleases the girl, which is how Latin says the girl likes Fidus.

Look at what English had to do there and what Latin did not. To Valeria: English needed to, Latin used an ending. With water: English needed with, Latin used an ending. With Marcus: English needed with again, and this time Latin needed a preposition too. Same English word twice, two different Latin answers. Sorting that out is the work of this lesson.

The dative: the person the action is aimed at

You already have the forms. They were sitting in the grids of lessons four to six.

The commonest use is the indirect object. Verbs of giving, showing, telling and entrusting take two objects in Latin as in English: the thing in the accusative and the person in the dative.

• Claudia Valeriae rosam dat. Claudia gives a rose to Valeria. Rosam is what is given; Valeriae is who gets it.
• Magister puerīs fābulam narrat. The teacher tells the boys a story.
• Dāvus dominō epistulam mōnstrat. Davus shows the master a letter.

English can shuffle those two objects around: give a rose to Valeria, or give Valeria a rose. Latin never has to, because the cases are already carrying the information.

The second common use is broader and has no single English word attached to it: the dative names the person for whom, or against whom, or in whose interest something happens. Syra dominae cēnam parat is Syra prepares dinner for the mistress. Nothing is handed over; the dative simply says who the dinner is for.

Verbs that take a dative where English takes a plain object

Here is a group that catches every first-year student. A handful of very common Latin verbs govern the dative even though their English translations take a direct object. Allen and Greenough collect them at section 367, and the ones you will meet earliest are these.

So Fīdus puellae placet is, word for word, Fidus is pleasing to the girl, and the natural English is the girl likes Fidus. The subject and object swap sides in translation, which is why these verbs have to be learned as constructions rather than as words.

In short: the dative is not only the case of to and for. It is the case of the person a verb is pointed at, and some verbs point rather than strike.

The ablative, and the four jobs it is holding down

The ablative is the busiest case in Latin, and the reason is historical: it absorbed the work of two or three older cases that the language lost. Four of its uses will cover most of what you read this year.

• Means or instrument, with no preposition. Rōmānus gladiō pugnat. The Roman fights with a sword. Valeria rosam aquā servat. Valeria keeps the rose alive with water. If you could call the thing a tool, it stands bare in the ablative.
• Accompaniment, with cum. Valeria cum Mārcō ambulat. Valeria walks with Marcus. If the with means alongside a person, the preposition is compulsory.
• Place where, with in. Fīdus in hortō dormit. Fidus is asleep in the garden. Note that in plus the ablative means in or on, while in plus the accusative means into; the case decides whether there is movement.
• Time when, with no preposition. Prīmā hōrā clientēs veniunt. At the first hour the clients arrive. Bellō multa oppida dēlentur would be during the war, though you will not build that passive verb until Latin II.

A fifth use, manner, sits between the first two: cum cūrā, with care, keeps its preposition because care is not a tool you hold.

The test that settles with

When an English sentence says with, ask one question: is it a thing being used, or a person being accompanied?

The one thing that will not work is translating English preposition by preposition. Latin does not object to cum; it objects to cum in front of a hammer.

When the dative and the ablative are spelled alike

Put the two cases side by side and an awkward fact appears.

Three of those four rows are identical, and the fourth is only distinguishable because a modern editor put a macron on it. So how did a Roman cope? By reading the sentence. A dative wants a person and a verb pointed at that person. An ablative of means wants a thing that could be used. If a preposition is standing in front of the word, it is an ablative, because no preposition in Latin governs the dative.

That last sentence is a genuinely useful rule. Cum, in, sine, ex, ab, dē: every one of them takes the ablative, and none of them takes the dative. A preposition is therefore proof.

Bottom line: when two case forms collide, stop looking at the word and look at the company it is keeping.

Nine sentences, sorted

• Gāius servīs pecūniam dat. Gaius gives money to the enslaved men. Dative plural.
• Syra cibum cultrō secat. Syra cuts the food with a knife. Culter, cultrī, knife, in the ablative of means.
• Mārcus cum amīcīs in viā ambulat. Marcus walks in the street with his friends. Accompaniment, then place where.
• Magister puerīs nōn nocet. The teacher does not harm the boys. Dative, because of nocet.
• Fābulae poētārum puellīs placent. The stories of the poets please the girls, that is, the girls like the poets' stories. Genitive, then dative, then a plural verb agreeing with fābulae.
• Valeria stilō epistulam scrībit. Valeria writes a letter with a pen. Stilus was the pointed metal writing tool for a wax tablet, and it is the ancestor of the word style.
• Prīmā hōrā Gāius in ātriō stat. At the first hour Gaius is standing in the atrium. Time when, then place where.
• Sine aquā rosa nōn vīvit. Without water the rose does not live. Sine takes the ablative.
• Claudia cum cūrā epistulam scrībit. Claudia writes the letter with care. Manner, so cum stays.

One sentence you cannot build out of that list is worth naming. Latin does not use the bare ablative of means for a person: you may cut bread with a knife, but you may not, grammatically, do a job with an enslaved man in the same construction. When a person is the route by which something is done, Latin reaches for the preposition per with the accusative, or rebuilds the sentence entirely. The grammar keeps a line between a tool and a human being that Roman society itself did not keep.

Roman life: what a Roman put on a gravestone

Roman law kept the dead outside the city, so the roads leading out of Rome were lined with tombs, and a traveller read the names of strangers for a mile before reaching open country. The stones speak in the cases you have just learned.

At the top, D M: Dīs Mānibus, dative plural, to the spirits of the dead. The Manes were the collective dead, grouped by Roman religion alongside the Lares of the household, and they were honoured every February at the festivals of the Parentalia and the Feralia. The abbreviation was so standard that it went on appearing at the top of Christian inscriptions long after the theology behind it had been abandoned.

At the bottom, often, four more letters: S T T L, sit tibi terra levis, may the earth be light on you. Tibi is the dative of tū. The phrase became formulaic in Latin epitaphs around the middle of the first century AD, displacing an older opening, hic situs est, here he lies. Its ancestor is a line in Euripides, where a chorus wishes that the earth may fall lightly on Alcestis, so the most Roman thing on a Roman tombstone came from a Greek tragedy written four centuries earlier.

Between those two formulas went the name, the age in years, months and days, and very often who paid for the stone: a husband, a freedman, a guild. The dative does most of the work on a Roman grave, because a tombstone is an address.

Common misconceptions

• With is always cum. A tool takes a bare ablative. Gladiō pugnat is correct Latin; cum gladiō pugnat would suggest the sword came along for company.
• The dative and the ablative are the same case with two names. They collide in spelling constantly, but they do different work, and a preposition in front of the word proves you are looking at an ablative.
• Placet means pleases, so Fidus placet puellam. The verb takes a dative, so it is Fīdus puellae placet, and the natural English reverses the subject and object: the girl likes Fidus.
• In always means in. With the ablative it means in or on; with the accusative it means into. The case is the difference between sitting in the garden and walking into it.

English that came out of this lesson

• gladius, sword: gladiator, and gladiolus, the little sword, named for the shape of its leaves.
• pecūnia, money: pecuniary, impecunious, and behind them pecus, cattle, because the oldest Roman wealth walked around on four legs.
• cūra, care: cure, curator, accurate, secure, and manicure, care of the hands.
• crēdō, trust: credit, credible, creed, credentials, incredible.
• noceō, harm: innocent, meaning not harming, and noxious and obnoxious.
• placeō, please: placid, placate, complacent, plea.
• levis, light: levity, elevate, alleviate, and leaven, which lightens bread.
• dō, give: data, the things given, and date, from the Roman habit of ending a letter with the place and day it was handed over.

Summing up

• The dative names the person an action is aimed at: the receiver, the beneficiary, the one harmed or pleased.
• Crēdit, nocet, placet, servit and pāret take a dative where English takes an object.
• The ablative covers means with no preposition, accompaniment with cum, place where with in, and time when with nothing.
• A tool takes the bare ablative; a companion takes cum.
• No Latin preposition governs the dative, so a preposition proves the word is ablative.

Sources

1. Allen, J. H., and Greenough, J. B. (2014). The dative case, including verbs governing the dative (section 367). In M. Ayer (Ed.), Allen and Greenough's New Latin Grammar for Schools and Colleges. Dickinson College Commentaries. dcc.dickinson.edu
2. Allen, J. H., and Greenough, J. B. (2014). The ablative case: means, accompaniment, place and time. In M. Ayer (Ed.), Allen and Greenough's New Latin Grammar. Dickinson College Commentaries. dcc.dickinson.edu
3. Wikipedia contributors. (n.d.). Manes. Wikipedia. en.wikipedia.org
4. Wikipedia contributors. (n.d.). Sit tibi terra levis. Wikipedia. en.wikipedia.org
5. Wikipedia contributors. (n.d.). Roman funerary practices. Wikipedia. en.wikipedia.org

Four letters on a Roman rubbish bin

Go to Rome today and you will find four letters stamped on manhole covers, drain grates and municipal rubbish bins: SPQR. They stood on Roman military standards two thousand years ago and they stand for Senātus Populusque Rōmānus, the Senate and the Roman People. The word that interests us is the last one. Rōmānus is an adjective, and it has taken the shape it has because populus is masculine, singular and nominative. Attach the same adjective to a different noun and it changes: pāx Rōmāna, the Roman peace, because pāx is feminine; imperium Rōmānum, Roman rule, because imperium is neuter.

One adjective, three shapes, and the noun chose every one of them. Here is the same machinery at work in the house.

Gāius Valerius est vir Rōmānus. Vīlla Valeriī est magna, sed hortus parvus est. In hortō sunt rosae pulchrae. Mārcus est puer bonus; Valeria est puella bona. Fīdus est canis fīdus. Servī fessī in agrīs longīs labōrant; vīta est dūra.

Gaius Valerius is a Roman man. The villa of Valerius is big, but the garden is small. In the garden there are beautiful roses. Marcus is a good boy; Valeria is a good girl. Fidus is a faithful dog. The tired enslaved men are working in the long fields; life is hard.

Glosses: sed but, fessus tired, dūrus hard, vīta life, fīdus faithful, which is where the dog got his name.

The rule, in eleven words

Allen and Greenough state it at section 286 and there is no more to it: adjectives agree with their nouns in gender, number and case. Three things must match, every time, with no exceptions anywhere in the language.

Notice what is not on that list. Declension is not on it. An adjective does not have to come from the same noun family as the word it describes; it only has to arrive at the same gender, the same number and the same case by whatever route its own endings take. That is why Fīdus est canis fīdus works: canis is a third declension noun you have not formally met, and fīdus is a second declension adjective, and they agree perfectly because both are masculine, singular and nominative.

bonus, bona, bonum, in full

An adjective of this class is really three nouns in one: the masculine goes like servus, the feminine like puella, the neuter like bellum. You have already learned every ending in this table.

A dictionary prints only the three nominative singulars, bonus, bona, bonum, because from those three you can build the rest. Some books shorten it further to bonus, -a, -um.

Two families of adjectives end in -er instead of -us, and they behave exactly like the -er nouns of lesson five. Pulcher, pulchra, pulchrum, beautiful, drops the e: pulchrī, pulchram, pulchrōrum. Miser, misera, miserum, wretched, keeps it: miserī, miseram, miserōrum. So does līber, lībera, līberum, free. As with the nouns, the second form printed in the dictionary is what tells you.

How to make an adjective agree, step by step

Take the English phrase the good farmer, as the subject of a sentence, and build it.

1. Find the noun and look it up. Farmer is agricola, agricolae, m. First declension, but masculine.
2. Decide number and case from the job. One farmer, and he is the subject, so: singular, nominative.
3. Put the three requirements together. Masculine, singular, nominative.
4. Read that form off the adjective's own table. Masculine nominative singular of bonus is bonus.
5. Result: agricola bonus.

It is not agricola bona. The two words do not rhyme, and they are not supposed to. The adjective is reporting the gender of the noun, and the gender of agricola is masculine no matter what its ending looks like.

Now change one input and watch the answer change. Take the good girls, as the direct object.

1. Girl is puella, puellae, f.
2. Several of them, and they are what the verb lands on, so: plural, accusative.
3. Feminine, plural, accusative.
4. Read it off: bonās.
5. Result: puellās bonās.

Two more for the pattern. With a big sword: gladius is masculine, the ablative of means is singular ablative, so magnō gladiō. The Roman dog: canis is masculine here, nominative singular, so canis Rōmānus, with the adjective from a different declension entirely.

Remember: look up the noun, not the adjective. The noun holds all three pieces of information, and the adjective is only obeying.

Standing beside the noun, or across the verb from it

An adjective can sit next to its noun and describe it, or it can stand on the far side of a verb like est and be asserted of it. Latin agrees in exactly the same way in both.

• Puella bona cantat. The good girl is singing. Bona is attached to puella: it is telling you which girl.
• Puella est bona. The girl is good. Bona is now the point of the sentence, not a label on the subject, but its endings have not moved.
• Agrī sunt longī. The fields are long. Longī matches agrī, masculine nominative plural.
• Dōna sunt magna. The gifts are large. Neuter nominative plural, and both words end in -a, which is coincidence rather than rhyme.

An adjective on its own

Latin will happily drop the noun and let the adjective stand by itself, and you fill in what is missing from the gender and number. This is called using an adjective substantively, and it is everywhere in Roman prose.

• bonī, masculine plural: the good men, the good people.
• Rōmānī: the Romans. There is no word for people in it at all.
• multa, neuter plural: many things. Multa videt is he sees many things.
• nostrī: our men, which in Caesar means our soldiers, hundreds of times.

English does a little of this, in phrases like the rich and the poor, but Latin does it constantly and without a fuss.

Where the adjective stands

Latin word order is free, but it is not random, and adjectives follow a tendency worth knowing. Allen and Greenough set it out at section 598: numeral adjectives, adjectives of quantity, and demonstratives tend to come before their noun, because they carry the emphasis. Descriptive adjectives more often follow. So a Roman is likely to write multae rosae, many roses, with the quantity first, and rosae pulchrae, beautiful roses, with the description second.

Likely, not always. Moving a descriptive adjective in front of its noun is one of the ways Latin shouts, and poets rearrange everything. You will not be marked wrong for either order this year, but if you want your Latin to sound Roman, put size and number in front and colour and quality behind.

So what?: agreement is compulsory and position is stylistic. Confusing the two is the commonest way a beginner's Latin ends up grammatically right and audibly foreign.

Twenty adjectives to own

Roman life: named for a chickpea

Adjectives did not stay in sentences. Romans wore them as names. The third name a Roman often carried, the cognomen, usually began as a remark about a person and then hardened into a family inheritance, so that generations of perfectly ordinary-looking people went on being called after an ancestor's peculiarity.

Rūfus means red-haired. Scaevola means left-handed. And the greatest orator in Roman history was called Marcus Tullius Cicero, from cicer, a chickpea, because somebody in the family had a wart or a nose that put people in mind of one. Plutarch reports that friends advised Cicero to drop it when he entered public life and that he refused, saying he would make the name more famous than any of theirs.

Look back at the adjective list above and you are looking at a Roman phone book. The pattern tells you something about how the Romans thought about individuals: not by inner qualities but by visible marks, and permanently. A boy born two centuries after the red-haired ancestor was still called Rufus, whatever colour his hair was.

Common misconceptions

• An adjective must rhyme with its noun. It must agree in gender, number and case, which is a different thing. Agricola bonus, nauta Rōmānus and canis fīdus all look mismatched and are all correct.
• Adjectives always follow the noun in Latin. Descriptive ones usually do; adjectives of number and quantity usually come first, and any adjective moves in front when it carries the weight of the sentence.
• Bona and dona both end in -a, so they are the same kind of form. Dōna is a neuter plural noun. Bona could be feminine singular or neuter plural, and only the noun it agrees with can tell you which.
• Pulcher is irregular. It is not, any more than ager is. It simply drops the e of its nominative from the stem, and the dictionary form pulchra tells you so before you ever meet it in a sentence.

English that came out of this lesson

• bonus, good: a bonus is literally a good thing, and bona fide means in good faith.
• malus, bad: malice, malign, malady, malaria, from bad air.
• altus, high and deep at once: altitude, exalt, and the musical alto.
• novus, new: novel, novice, innovate, renovate, and the nova that astronomers name for a new star.
• pulcher, beautiful: pulchritude, a word that sounds far uglier than what it describes.
• līber, free: liberty, liberal, liberate, and deliver, to set free from.
• vērus, true: verify, veracity, verdict, a true saying, and the English very, which began as truly.
• sōlus, alone: sole, solitary, solo, soliloquy, and desolate.
• clārus, clear and famous: clarify, declare, and the clarion that was loud enough to be heard.

Looking back

• An adjective agrees with its noun in gender, number and case. Declension is not part of the bargain.
• Bonus, bona, bonum uses the endings of servus, puella and bellum, all of which you already knew.
• Pulcher drops its e, miser and līber keep theirs, and the dictionary tells you which before you need it.
• Look up the noun, work out its gender, number and case, and then read the matching form off the adjective.
• An adjective with no noun is a noun: bonī, good men; multa, many things.
• Quantity and number go in front; description usually goes behind.

Sources

1. Allen, J. H., and Greenough, J. B. (2014). Agreement of adjectives (section 286). In M. Ayer (Ed.), Allen and Greenough's New Latin Grammar for Schools and Colleges. Dickinson College Commentaries. dcc.dickinson.edu
2. Allen, J. H., and Greenough, J. B. (2014). First and second declension adjectives. In M. Ayer (Ed.), Allen and Greenough's New Latin Grammar. Dickinson College Commentaries. dcc.dickinson.edu
3. Allen, J. H., and Greenough, J. B. (2014). Order of words (section 598). In M. Ayer (Ed.), Allen and Greenough's New Latin Grammar. Dickinson College Commentaries. dcc.dickinson.edu
4. Wikipedia contributors. (n.d.). SPQR. Wikipedia. en.wikipedia.org
5. Wikipedia contributors. (n.d.). Cognomen. Wikipedia. en.wikipedia.org

The Latin printed on the back of a television

Look at the sockets on the back of a television or a sound system and two words are printed there: VIDEO and AUDIO. They are not abbreviations and they are not invented jargon. They are Latin verbs, in the first person singular of the present tense. Videō means I see. Audiō means I hear. Somebody in the 1930s needed a label for the picture channel and the sound channel and reached for the language that already had the words.

Those two verbs belong to different families. Videō is second conjugation; audiō is fourth. This lesson is about telling the families apart, and here is a schoolroom scene that uses three of them.

Mārcus in lūdō sedet. Magister docet; puerī audiunt. Mārcus nōn audit: avēs per fenestram spectat. Magister rogat: "Quid agis, Mārce?" Mārcus respondet: "Audiō, magister." Sed magister nōn crēdit.

Marcus is sitting in school. The teacher teaches; the boys are listening. Marcus is not listening: he is watching the birds through the window. The teacher asks: what are you doing, Marcus? Marcus answers: I am listening, sir. But the teacher does not believe him.

Glosses: docet teaches, avēs birds, per fenestram through the window, quid agis what are you doing, crēdit believes. Four different conjugations are at work in those five sentences, and the person endings on all of them are the same six you learned in lesson three.

Four families, told apart by one vowel

Every regular Latin verb belongs to one of four conjugations, and the infinitive announces which. Cut off the -re and look at the vowel in front of it.

Two rows of that table look identical in the infinitive column, and the difference between them is the first person singular: a third conjugation verb gives regō, while the -iō branch gives capiō. That is the only warning you get, which is why a dictionary always prints both forms.

The second and third conjugations also look alike on the page, and here the difference is one you can hear. Monēre has a long e, so the penult is heavy and the stress falls on it: mo-NEH-re. Regere has a short e, so the penult is light and the stress retreats: RE-ge-re. If somebody reads a Latin infinitive aloud correctly, you can tell its conjugation with your eyes shut.

All five patterns, side by side

Here is the present indicative active of one verb from each family. Read across the rows, not down the columns, and you will see that the endings never change; only the vowel in front of them moves.

Four observations will save you a great deal of memorising.

• The first and second conjugations are easy because the stem vowel simply stays put. Monēre gives monē- plus the endings, with the long e shortening before final -t and -nt exactly as in amat and amant. Only moneō is odd, and it is odd in the opposite way from amō: here the vowel survives instead of being swallowed.
• The third conjugation has no stem vowel of its own. The stem is reg-, and Latin drops in a short connecting vowel to make the word sayable: regis, regit, regimus, regitis, with u before the -nt of regunt. This is the family that a beginner finds slipperiest, and it is also the family with the most useful verbs in it.
• The fourth conjugation keeps its long i everywhere except in audit, where the shortening rule bites, and it adds an extra u in the plural: audiunt, not audint.
• The -iō branch of the third is the third conjugation with an i wherever there is room. Compare capis with regis, and then capiunt with regunt. Six verbs of this type do most of the work: capiō, faciō, fugiō, iaciō, rapiō, cupiō.

The point: you are not learning five sets of endings. You are learning one set of endings and five ways of getting to them.

Verbs worth having in each family

Eight sentences across all four families

• Magister puerōs docet. The teacher teaches the boys. Second conjugation.
• Puerī magistrum timent. The boys fear the teacher. Second, plural.
• Gāius epistulam scrībit. Gaius is writing a letter. Third.
• Servī aquam ex hortō portant. The enslaved men carry water out of the garden. First, with ex plus the ablative.
• Valeria librum capit et legit. Valeria picks up a book and reads it. Third in -iō, then third.
• Cūr fugitis? Why are you running away? Third in -iō, second person plural.
• Dāvus iānuam aperit; clientēs veniunt. Davus opens the door; the clients arrive. Fourth twice.
• Nōn dormīmus; audīmus. We are not asleep; we are listening. Fourth twice, first person plural.

Notice how little you had to think about the endings. -t and -nt, -s and -tis, -ō and -mus: the same six from lesson three, doing the same six jobs, in every family.

Roman life: an hour that was not sixty minutes

When the teacher in that schoolroom scene says the lesson runs until the fourth hour, he does not mean four o'clock. Romans divided the daylight, from sunrise to sunset, into twelve hours, numbered hōra prīma through hōra duodecima. Twelve hours of daylight in December is not twelve hours of daylight in June, so the length of a Roman hour moved with the calendar: around 45 minutes at the winter solstice and about 75 minutes at the summer one, at Mediterranean latitudes. Noon was always the sixth hour, because noon is always halfway.

Telling the time therefore meant reading a shadow. Pliny the Elder records the arrival of the first public sundial at Rome, captured from the Samnites and set up around 293 to 290 BC. Another came from Sicily in 263 BC. Neither had been designed for the latitude of Rome, and a sundial built for one latitude is simply wrong at another; the first one made for Rome itself did not appear until 164 BC. For more than a century the city read the time off an instrument that did not fit it, and for cloudy days and for the night there were water clocks, calibrated against the sundial when the sun was out.

In short: a Roman present tense describes what is happening now, and the Romans themselves were vaguer about now than you are.

Common misconceptions

• Each conjugation has its own personal endings. It has its own stem vowel. The endings -ō, -s, -t, -mus, -tis, -nt are identical in all four families and will stay identical in the imperfect and the future.
• Regit and audit look the same, so the verbs behave the same. They collide in the third person singular and part company everywhere else: regunt against audiunt, regimus against audīmus. Learn the first person singular and the infinitive together and the collision never matters.
• Capio is irregular. It is a regular third conjugation verb that keeps an i wherever the sound allows. Once you see capis beside regis and capiunt beside regunt, the pattern is fixed.
• The conjugation can be read off the meaning. It cannot. Videō and audiō are both about the senses and belong to different families; dīcō and nārrō both mean telling and belong to different families. Only the infinitive knows.

English that came out of this lesson

• moneō, warn: monitor, one who warns, admonish, premonition, and a monument, which warns you that somebody existed.
• videō, see: video, vision, evident, supervise, and provide, to see ahead.
• regō, rule: regent, rector, regular, direct, correct, and through rēx, regal.
• dūcō, lead: duke, conduct, induce, aqueduct, a thing that leads water.
• mittō, send: mission, missile, transmit, dismiss, permit.
• dīcō, say: dictate, dictionary, predict, verdict, contradict.
• capiō, take: capture, captive, accept, recipient, capable.
• audiō, hear: audio, audience, auditorium, and obey, worn down from oboedīre, to listen toward somebody.
• veniō, come: convene, advent, invent, to come upon, prevent, revenue.
• sciō, know: science, conscience, omniscient, prescience.

Pulling it together

• The infinitive names the conjugation: -āre, -ēre long, -ere short, -īre.
• Second and third are told apart by ear as well as by eye: mo-NEH-re against RE-ge-re.
• The third conjugation has no stem vowel and borrows a short one, ending in -unt in the third person plural.
• The fourth keeps its long i and adds a u: audiunt.
• Capiō, capere is third conjugation with an i wherever there is room, along with faciō, fugiō, iaciō, rapiō and cupiō.
• The six person endings never change, in any family or any tense.

Sources

1. Allen, J. H., and Greenough, J. B. (2014). The four conjugations. In M. Ayer (Ed.), Allen and Greenough's New Latin Grammar for Schools and Colleges. Dickinson College Commentaries. dcc.dickinson.edu
2. Allen, J. H., and Greenough, J. B. (2014). Third conjugation paradigms. In M. Ayer (Ed.), Allen and Greenough's New Latin Grammar. Dickinson College Commentaries. dcc.dickinson.edu
3. Wiktionary contributors. (n.d.). capio. Wiktionary. en.wiktionary.org
4. Wikipedia contributors. (n.d.). Roman timekeeping. Wikipedia. en.wikipedia.org
5. Pliny the Elder. Naturalis Historia, Book 7, on the introduction of sundials at Rome, as summarised in the article above.

A line written by a man who had been somebody's property

In 163 BC, at the festival of the Megalensian Games in Rome, an audience heard a character named Chremes say this:

Homō sum: hūmānī nīl ā mē aliēnum putō.

I am a man: I consider nothing human foreign to me. The first two words are the entire grammar of this lesson. Homō is a nominative, sum is the verb to be, and there is no object anywhere, because being is not something you do to anything.

The playwright was Publius Terentius Afer, whom English calls Terence. Suetonius says he was born in Carthage and brought to Rome as a slave in the household of a senator, Terentius Lucanus, who had him educated and then freed him. He took his former owner's family name, as freed Romans did, wrote six comedies, all of which survive complete, and was dead by about 159 BC, in his twenties or thirties. Cicero and Caesar both admired his Latin. The most quoted sentence about shared humanity in the language was written by somebody who had legally been a piece of property.

The most irregular verb in Latin, and the one you already half know

Every language that has a verb for being seems to mangle it, and Latin is no exception. English says am, is, are, was, were, and nobody notices how strange that is until they try to explain it. Latin does the same thing with the same verb, for the same reason: it is the oldest and most used verb there is, and heavy use wears words into odd shapes.

The pattern is not random, and seeing the logic makes it stick. Half the forms begin with es- and half have worn that down to a bare s-. The verb is built on an ancient root that also gave English is, German ist and Greek esti. When you say it is, you are using the same word a Roman used when he said est, inherited rather than borrowed, down two separate family lines from a common ancestor nobody wrote down. The dictionary entry is sum, esse, fuī, and only the first two of those matter this year.

Dinner at the ninth hour

Hōra nōna est. Familia in trīclīniō est. Gāius adest; Claudia adest; Mārcus et Valeria adsunt. Sed Fīdus abest: in hortō dormit. Cēna bona est: ōva, piscis, pānis, vīnum. "Ubi est Fīdus?" rogat Valeria. "Fīdus semper abest," respondet Mārcus, "sed cibus numquam abest."

It is the ninth hour. The family is in the dining room. Gaius is here; Claudia is here; Marcus and Valeria are here. But Fidus is missing: he is asleep in the garden. The dinner is good: eggs, fish, bread, wine. Where is Fidus? asks Valeria. Fidus is always missing, answers Marcus, but the food never is.

Glosses: trīclīnium dining room, ōvum egg, piscis fish, pānis bread, ubi where, numquam never.

Two nominatives, one verb

Sum does not act on anything. It links. What stands on the far side of it is therefore not an accusative but a second nominative, describing or identifying the first one. Grammarians call it the predicate nominative.

• Gāius est vir. Gaius is a man. Both Gāius and vir are nominative, because they are the same person.
• Mārcus est puer. Marcus is a boy.
• Dāvus et Syra sunt servī. Davus and Syra are enslaved. A plural subject takes a plural verb and a plural predicate.

Compare what a transitive verb does with the same nouns. Gāius virum vocat is Gaius calls a man, and virum is accusative because the calling lands on him. Gāius est vir has no landing; there is only one person in the sentence, named twice.

The same holds for adjectives. A predicate adjective agrees with the subject in gender, number and case, exactly as an attributive one would.

• Cēna bona est. The dinner is good. Bona is feminine nominative singular, matching cēna.
• Agrī sunt longī. The fields are long.
• Dōna sunt magna. The gifts are large.

Worth holding on to: after sum, everything stays nominative. If you have written an accusative after a form of sum, something has gone wrong.

Being here, and being somewhere else

Latin builds compound verbs by gluing a preposition onto the front, and sum takes two of these constantly.

The compound is just the ordinary verb with a lump on the front, and you conjugate what is behind the lump. A Roman schoolmaster taking a register asked for exactly the word your teacher may still use: adsum, I am here. Absum is the ancestor of absent, and the ab- in it means away from.

The same trick makes possum, I am able, out of an old word for able plus sum, and praesum, I am in charge of, out of prae, in front. You will meet those properly in Latin II, but you can already see them inside the English words possible and preside.

How Latin says have without a verb for have

Latin does own a verb for have, habeō, and uses it. But there is a second construction that is commoner in older and more idiomatic Latin, and it turns the whole sentence inside out. Allen and Greenough set it out at section 373: the dative goes with esse to express possession.

• Gāiō est vīlla magna. Word for word: to Gaius there is a big villa. In English: Gaius has a big villa.
• Est mihi domī pater. A line of Virgil's: I have a father at home. Mihi is the dative of I.
• Puerō est canis. The boy has a dog.

Notice which word is the subject. In Gāiō est vīlla magna the subject is the villa, which is why it is nominative and why the verb is singular. Gaius, the owner, sits in the dative, exactly like the person a thing is given to. Allen and Greenough add a useful distinction: the dative construction stresses the fact that the thing exists at all, while habeō or a genitive stresses who owns it.

There is, there are, and three English words Latin does not have

Est and sunt at the head of a clause usually mean there is and there are. In hortō sunt rosae is there are roses in the garden, not the roses are in the garden, though either English can be right depending on what came before.

And here is a thing worth saying plainly, because it makes beginners nervous for weeks. Latin has no word for a, no word for an, and no word for the. Cēna bona est is the dinner is good, or a dinner is good, or dinner is good. You supply the article that English needs from the situation, and no Roman ever felt a gap. When you translate, put in whichever article sounds right; when you compose, do not go looking for one.

Roman life: the stage, and a name taken from an owner

Roman comedy was not read; it was shouted over a crowd at a religious festival, on a temporary wooden stage, in competition with rope-dancers and gladiators. Terence lost part of one audience to a rumour that a tightrope walker was about to perform. His plays are adaptations of Greek originals, mostly by Menander, moved into Latin with two Greek plots sometimes spliced into one, a practice his rivals attacked him for in prologues he then answered in prologues of his own.

The biography matters for reading the line. Homō sum is spoken by a nosy neighbour defending himself for interfering in somebody else's business, so in its own play it is half a joke. It became something else entirely. Roman writers quoted it; Renaissance humanists took it as a slogan; it turns up in speeches about human rights two thousand years after a formerly enslaved North African wrote it for a comedy about a father and son.

Keep both halves in view. The line is not a manifesto in its context, and the man who wrote it did not choose his own name: Terentius came from the senator who owned him, and Afer means the African. Roman society produced the sentence and also produced the conditions that make it worth quoting.

Common misconceptions

• Sum takes an object, so Gaius est virum. It does not. Sum links two nominatives, and an accusative after it is always an error.
• Adsum and absum have to be memorised separately. They are sum with a prefix. Conjugate the part you already know and leave the prefix alone.
• Gaio est villa means Gaius is a villa. The nominative is vīlla and the dative is Gāiō, so the sentence means Gaius has a villa. Check which word is nominative before you decide who is what.
• Latin left out the word for the because writers were being terse. The language never had one. Neither did it have a or an. The articles English needs are supplied by the translator, not dropped by the Roman.

English that came out of this lesson

• sum and esse: essence, essential, and the abbreviation i.e., which is id est, that is.
• absum: absent, absence, absentee.
• praesum: present, preside, president, all of them about being in front.
• possum: possible, potent, omnipotent, puissant.
• interest, it is between and so it matters: the English interest, which still means what concerns you.
• futūrus, going to be: the future.
• homō, human being: human, humane, homicide, and the Homo in Homo sapiens.
• cēna, dinner: cenacle, an upper dining room.

Recap

• Sum, es, est, sumus, estis, sunt. Learn it as a chant; it will not yield to logic.
• What follows sum is nominative, whether it is a noun or an adjective.
• A predicate adjective agrees with the subject in gender, number and case.
• Adsum and absum are sum with a prefix, and mean be present and be away.
• The dative with esse means have: Gāiō est vīlla, Gaius has a villa.
• Latin has no articles at all, and supplies nothing where English needs a or the.

Sources

1. Allen, J. H., and Greenough, J. B. (2014). The verb sum. In M. Ayer (Ed.), Allen and Greenough's New Latin Grammar for Schools and Colleges. Dickinson College Commentaries. dcc.dickinson.edu
2. Allen, J. H., and Greenough, J. B. (2014). Dative of possession (section 373). In M. Ayer (Ed.), Allen and Greenough's New Latin Grammar. Dickinson College Commentaries. dcc.dickinson.edu
3. Terence. (n.d.). Heauton Timorumenos, line 77. The Latin Library. thelatinlibrary.com
4. Wikipedia contributors. (n.d.). Terence. Wikipedia. en.wikipedia.org
5. Wiktionary contributors. (n.d.). sum. Wiktionary. en.wiktionary.org

A question with no question mark

On 8 November 63 BC, in a temple on the Palatine, Cicero stood up in front of the Senate and said this:

Quō usque tandem abūtēre, Catilīna, patientiā nostrā?

How far, then, will you go on abusing our patience, Catiline? It is a question. Every Roman in the room heard it as a question. But the text Cicero's secretary took down had no question mark, because the question mark did not exist. The earliest one anybody has found is a squiggle in a Frankish gospel book of about AD 783, more than eight centuries later.

So here is the problem this lesson solves. If a Latin sentence carries no punctuation and no fixed word order, how does the reader know it is a question rather than a statement? The answer is that Latin marks questions with words, and it does the same for commands, and once you know the markers you can never mistake either.

Morning orders in the house of the Valerii

"Dāve! Venī!" clāmat Gāius. "Ubi est Mārcus?" Dāvus respondet: "In hortō est, domine." "Mārce, venī! Nōlī in hortō sedēre! Portā librōs in ātrium!" Mārcus rogat: "Cūr semper labōrō?" Claudia rīdet: "Nōnne puer es? Labōrā!"

Davus! Come here! shouts Gaius. Where is Marcus? Davus answers: he is in the garden, master. Marcus, come here! Do not sit about in the garden! Carry the books into the atrium! Marcus asks: why am I always working? Claudia laughs: you are a boy, are you not? Get to work!

Glosses: rīdet laughs, in ātrium into the atrium, with the accusative for movement. Count the markers: two vocatives, four commands, one negative command, two question words and one nōnne. Everything in this lesson is in that paragraph.

The imperative is the stem, and almost nothing else

To tell one person to do something, take the infinitive and cut off the -re. That is the whole rule. To tell several people, add -te.

The one wrinkle is the third conjugation, which has no stem vowel of its own and so borrows an e in the singular and an i in the plural: rege but regite, mitte but mittite. You met exactly the same borrowing in regis and regimus two lessons ago.

Four extremely common verbs shorten the singular to a single syllable, and you simply have to know them.

Generations of students have memorised those four as dic, duc, fac and fer, said quickly, and there is no better method. Sum has an imperative too, es and este, be, which looks confusingly like the second person of the verb and is rare enough not to worry about.

Telling somebody not to

Latin will not simply put nōn in front of an imperative. To forbid something in ordinary classical prose you use the imperative of a verb meaning be unwilling, followed by an infinitive.

• Nōlī clāmāre! Do not shout. Literally: be unwilling to shout.
• Nōlīte timēre! Do not be afraid, said to more than one person.
• Nōlī in hortō sedēre! Do not sit about in the garden.

Allen and Greenough record two other ways at section 450, using cavē or nē with a subjunctive, which you will meet in Latin II. For this year, nōlī and nōlīte will cover every prohibition you need.

Key idea: a command is the barest form of the verb, and a prohibition is a command not to want. Latin is politer about forbidding than about ordering.

Four ways to ask

A Latin question is marked by a word, and the word tells you more than English punctuation does, because it also tells you what answer the speaker expects. Allen and Greenough set this out at section 332.

The little -ne is an enclitic, which means it has no life of its own and leans on the front word of the sentence, whichever word that happens to be. Move the word and you move the emphasis: Estne in hortō? asks whether he is there at all, while In hortōne est? asks whether it is the garden he is in.

Nōnne is nōn plus -ne, and it works like the English tag isn't he. Num is its mirror image, and the best English for it is usually surely not. When Claudia says Nōnne puer es? she is not asking for information; she is telling Marcus to stop complaining.

The question words

English collapses three of those into one word. Where, where to and where from are all where in modern English, and Latin keeps them apart as ubi, quō and unde, exactly as older English kept where, whither and whence.

Latin has no word for yes

This surprises everybody, and it is true. There is no ordinary Latin word meaning yes and none meaning no. A Roman answering a question repeats the verb.

• Estne Mārcus in hortō? Est. Is Marcus in the garden? He is.
• Venitne Dāvus? Nōn venit. Is Davus coming? He is not.
• Labōrāsne? Labōrō. Are you working? I am.

Where emphasis is wanted, Latin has adverbs that do part of the job: ita, sīc, certē, vērō for agreement, minimē for refusal. The Italian and Spanish words for yes, sì and sí, come from sīc, which meant thus; French oui comes from a different Latin phrase altogether. The Romance languages each had to invent a yes because Latin never supplied one.

Roman life: a law code written entirely in commands

Around 450 BC a board of ten men drafted the first Roman law code, and the finished Twelve Tables were promulgated in 449 BC and posted in public on bronze so that anyone could read them. Table I opens like this:

Sī in iūs vocat, ītō. If he calls you to court, go.

Ītō is an imperative, and not the kind you have just learned: it is the future imperative, a form ending in -tō that Latin reserved for laws, contracts, wills and standing instructions. Allen and Greenough note at section 449 that this is where it lives. The Tables are full of them: datō, let him give; orātō, let him plead; capitō, let him seize. Roman law does not describe what is right. It tells an unnamed person what to do, forever.

Cicero says he learned the Twelve Tables by heart at school as a boy, and adds that nobody did so any more. That is a small, ordinary sentence about a whole civilisation changing its mind about what children should carry in their heads. The laws had been a carmen, a thing chanted; by Cicero's adulthood they were a historical document.

Common misconceptions

• You make a command negative with non. Classical prose uses nōlī or nōlīte plus the infinitive. Nōn clāmā is not Latin.
• -ne means the answer is yes. It means a question is being asked and takes no side. Nōnne expects yes and num expects no, and choosing the wrong one reverses what the speaker is implying.
• Dic, duc, fac and fer are typing errors for dice, duce, face and fere. They are genuine shortened imperatives of four very common verbs, and their plurals are perfectly regular.
• Latin must have had a word for yes; the textbooks just have not taught it. It did not. Romans repeated the verb, and the modern Italian and Spanish yes comes from sīc, a word that meant thus.

English that came out of this lesson

• dīc, from dīcō: dictate, edict, indicate, verdict.
• dūc, from dūcō: conduct, ductile, abduct, viaduct.
• fac, from faciō: fact, factory, manufacture, and fiat, let it be done.
• fer, from ferō: transfer, refer, infer, fertile.
• nōlī, be unwilling, from nōlō: the legal phrase nolo contendere, I do not wish to contest it.
• quis and quid: quiz is disputed, but quid pro quo, something for something, is straight Latin, and so is the quiddity of a thing.
• audī, from audiō: audit, originally a hearing of accounts read aloud.
• cavē, beware: caveat, and the cavē canem of the very first lesson.

What to remember

• Imperative singular: the infinitive minus -re. Plural: add -te.
• The third conjugation borrows a vowel: rege, regite.
• Dīc, dūc, fac, fer, with regular plurals dīcite, dūcite, facite, ferte.
• Negative commands take nōlī or nōlīte plus the infinitive.
• -ne asks neutrally, nōnne expects yes, num expects no.
• Latin has no word for yes or no; repeat the verb.

Sources

1. Allen, J. H., and Greenough, J. B. (2014). Questions: the particles -ne, nonne and num (section 332). In M. Ayer (Ed.), Allen and Greenough's New Latin Grammar for Schools and Colleges. Dickinson College Commentaries. dcc.dickinson.edu
2. Allen, J. H., and Greenough, J. B. (2014). The imperative: commands, the future imperative in laws (section 449) and prohibition (section 450). In M. Ayer (Ed.), Allen and Greenough's New Latin Grammar. Dickinson College Commentaries. dcc.dickinson.edu
3. Cicero, M. Tullius. (n.d.). In Catilinam 1.1. The Latin Library. thelatinlibrary.com
4. Duodecim Tabularum Leges, Table I. (n.d.). The Latin Library. thelatinlibrary.com
5. Wikipedia contributors. (n.d.). Question mark. Wikipedia. en.wikipedia.org

Two Latin pronouns on a psychiatrist's bookshelf

Sigmund Freud wrote in German about das Es, das Ich and das Uber-Ich: the It, the I, and the Over-I, ordinary words a German reader understood at sight. When James Strachey carried Freud into English he reached for Latin instead, and the three became the id, the ego and the superego. Id is the Latin for it. Ego is the Latin for I. The two words that anchor a century of psychology are a first-year Latin pronoun table.

Here is the same table doing humbler work.

Mārcus Valeriae dīcit: "Ubi est liber meus?" Valeria respondet: "Librum tuum nōn habeō. Ecce! Fīdus eum habet." Mārcus clāmat: "Fīde! Redde mihi librum meum!" Sed canis librum suum putat.

Marcus says to Valeria: where is my book? Valeria answers: I do not have your book. Look! Fidus has it. Marcus shouts: Fidus! Give me back my book! But the dog considers the book his own.

Glosses: ecce look, redde give back, putat thinks, considers. Six pronoun forms in four sentences: meus, tuum, eum, mihi, meum, suum.

A wrong sentence that is perfectly good Latin

A student wanting to write Marcus has his own book produced this:

Mārcus librum eius habet.

It parses. It breaks no rule. It is also not what the student meant, and that is what makes this the single most useful error in first-year Latin. Trace it.

1. Find out what eius actually is. It is the genitive singular of is, ea, id, and it means of him, of her, of it. Like any genitive, it names a person outside the sentence's subject.
2. Read the sentence as written. Marcus has the book of him, that is, somebody else's book. Whose? Somebody mentioned in the previous sentence. Not Marcus.
3. Find the form that points back at the subject. That is suus, sua, suum, a possessive adjective meaning his own, her own, their own, always looking back at the subject of its own clause.
4. Repair it. Mārcus librum suum habet. Marcus has his own book. The adjective is suum, accusative masculine singular, because it agrees with librum.

Now notice why this matters so much. An error that produces nonsense announces itself. An error that produces a different true sentence does not, and a reader two thousand years from now cannot ask you what you meant. Roman lawyers built careers on this distinction.

The upshot: suus looks back at the subject; eius points away from it. Ask yourself whose, and then ask whether that person is the one doing the verb.

I and you

Latin does have pronouns for the first and second person, and lesson three told you it uses them mainly for emphasis. Here they are in full.

One oddity is worth meeting now because it looks like a mistake when you first see it. With the preposition cum, these pronouns swallow it: not cum mē but mēcum, with me; then tēcum, nōbīscum, vōbīscum, and sēcum, with himself. The Latin Mass preserved one of these for centuries in the line Dominus vōbīscum, the Lord be with you.

The third person pronoun Latin does not have

There is no Latin word that simply means he or she or it. What Latin has is a weak demonstrative, is, ea, id, whose first job is to mean that one and whose second job is to fill the gap. You will meet it constantly.

Two things to notice. The genitive is eius for all three genders, which is convenient and also the reason the earlier error is so easy to make. And the endings are mostly the familiar ones: -um, -am, -ōrum, -īs. Only the nominative singular forms and the -ius genitive are new.

• Fīdus eum habet. Fidus has it, meaning the book, which is masculine.
• Eam videō. I see her.
• Eīs pecūniam dat. He gives money to them.
• Liber eius est. It is his book, or her book. The sentence alone does not say which.

Possessives agree with the thing, not the owner

The possessive adjectives are ordinary first and second declension adjectives, and they behave like every adjective you learned in lesson eight: they take their gender, number and case from the noun they sit beside.

This is the point where English speakers reliably go wrong, because English possessives do the opposite. English his and her report the sex of the owner. Latin suus reports the gender of the thing owned. Claudia's book is liber suus, masculine, because liber is masculine. Gaius's villa is vīlla sua, feminine, because vīlla is feminine. The owner has no vote.

Noster and vester drop their e exactly as ager and pulcher do. And meus keeps the odd vocative you met in lesson five: mī fīlī, my son.

One more habit: Latin leaves possessives out far more often than English puts them in. Librum habeō normally means I have my book, because whose else would it be? A possessive appears when there is a real contrast to draw.

Roman life: everybody was tu

Cicero wrote hundreds of letters to his friend Atticus and every one of them opens the same way: Cicerō Atticō sal. The last word is short for salūtem dīcit, sends greeting, with the sender in the nominative and the recipient in the dative. The letter itself then addressed Atticus as tū, because in the Roman republic everyone was tū. A father, a friend, an enslaved cook, a consul, a god in a prayer: one word for all of them.

That changed. From the fourth century AD Roman emperors began to be addressed as vōs, in the plural, although there was only one person standing there. One explanation is the plain fact that for a while there were two emperors, one in Rome and one in Constantinople. Another, which linguists prefer, is that plurality is an old and very widespread metaphor for power: a great person counts as more than one. The habit spread outward to other powerful figures, and Pope Gregory I, who held office from 590 to 604, was addressed the same way.

Everything that followed in Europe grows out of that shift. French tu against vous, Spanish tú against usted, German du against Sie, and the reason English lost thou and kept only the old plural you: all of it descends from the moment somebody decided that one emperor was too important to be spoken to in the singular.

Common misconceptions

• Suus means his, so it matches a male owner. It matches the noun it is attached to. Vīlla sua is feminine whether the owner is Gaius or Claudia.
• Eius and suus are interchangeable. They are opposites. Suus refers back to the subject of its clause; eius refers to somebody else. Both are correct Latin, which is exactly the danger.
• Is, ea, id is the Latin word for he, she, it. It is a weak demonstrative pressed into that service. Its underlying meaning is that one, and it often keeps that flavour.
• Cum me is how you say with me. The preposition attaches to the back of these pronouns: mēcum, tēcum, nōbīscum, vōbīscum.

English that came out of this lesson

• ego: ego, egotism, egocentric, and Freud's superego.
• id: the psychoanalytic id, and the abbreviation ibid., from ibīdem, in the same place.
• meus: the Magnificat opens magnificat anima mea, my soul magnifies.
• noster: paternoster, our father, and the lifts called paternosters because they run in an endless loop like beads.
• suus: suicide, killing of oneself, and sui generis, of its own kind.
• tū: tutoyer in French, to call somebody tu, a verb English has never needed.
• nōs: nostrum, a quack remedy, literally our own, because the seller claimed the recipe.
• vōbīscum: the phrase Dominus vobiscum, and its reply, kept the form alive through fifteen centuries of Latin liturgy.

The short version

• Ego, meī, mihi, mē, mē; tū, tuī, tibi, tē, tē; then nōs and vōs.
• Cum attaches to the back: mēcum, tēcum, nōbīscum, vōbīscum.
• Latin has no true third person pronoun; is, ea, id does the work, with eius as its genitive for all genders.
• Possessive adjectives agree with the thing possessed, never with the owner.
• Suus points back at the subject of its own clause; eius points at somebody else.
• Latin omits possessives whenever the owner is obvious.

Sources

1. Allen, J. H., and Greenough, J. B. (2014). Personal pronouns: paradigms. In M. Ayer (Ed.), Allen and Greenough's New Latin Grammar for Schools and Colleges. Dickinson College Commentaries. dcc.dickinson.edu
2. Allen, J. H., and Greenough, J. B. (2014). Demonstrative pronouns: paradigms, including is, ea, id. In M. Ayer (Ed.), Allen and Greenough's New Latin Grammar. Dickinson College Commentaries. dcc.dickinson.edu
3. Cicero, M. Tullius. (n.d.). Epistulae ad Atticum, Book 1. The Latin Library. thelatinlibrary.com
4. Wikipedia contributors. (n.d.). T-V distinction. Wikipedia. en.wikipedia.org
5. Wikipedia contributors. (n.d.). Id, ego and superego. Wikipedia. en.wikipedia.org

A poem its author asked to have burned

Virgil worked on the Aeneid from about 29 BC until his death on 21 September 19 BC, and it was still unfinished. He left instructions that the manuscript be burned. Augustus overruled them and had it published with as few changes as possible, which is why you can read its first line today:

Arma virumque canō, Trōiae quī prīmus ab ōrīs Ītaliam, fātō profugus, Lāvīniaque vēnit lītora.

Arms and the man I sing, who first from the shores of Troy came, an exile by fate, to Italy and the Lavinian coast. You are not expected to read that yet. But look at how much of it you can already touch: arma is weapons, virum is the accusative of vir, Ītaliam is accusative, fātō is an ablative, and prīmus is a first and second declension adjective agreeing with quī. Five words out of fifteen, in the hardest line in Latin poetry, in your thirteenth lesson.

The story that line introduces is where this module lives. Here it is in Latin you can read straight through.

Aenēās fugit

Aenēās Trōiānus erat. Trōia in Asiā erat. Graecī Trōiam oppugnābant et dēlēbant. Aenēās cum sociīs fugiēbat; patrem in umerīs portābat, fīlium manū tenēbat. Nāvēs parābant et per maria nāvigābant. Iūnō dea Trōiānōs nōn amābat: ventōs excitābat, et nautae timēbant. Sed Aenēās fātum habēbat: novam patriam in Ītaliā quaerēbat.

Aeneas was a Trojan. Troy was in Asia. The Greeks were attacking Troy and destroying it. Aeneas was escaping with his companions; he was carrying his father on his shoulders and holding his son by the hand. They were getting ships ready and sailing across the seas. The goddess Juno did not love the Trojans: she kept whipping up the winds, and the sailors were afraid. But Aeneas had a destiny: he was looking for a new homeland in Italy.

Glosses: oppugnō attack, dēleō destroy, socius companion, umerus shoulder, manū with his hand, nāvis ship, mare sea, excitō stir up, fātum destiny, quaerō look for.

Every verb in that paragraph is in a tense you have not learned, and you understood all of them, because -bā- in the middle of a Latin verb means the same thing that was doing means in English.

One syllable makes the past

The imperfect is the easiest tense in Latin. Take the present stem, insert -bā-, and add endings.

Three notes and you are done.

• The first person singular ends in -m, not -ō. This is the only change to the person endings, and it will hold for every tense except the present and the future of the first two conjugations. So the set here is -m, -s, -t, -mus, -tis, -nt.
• The first and second conjugations simply add -bā-. Amā- plus -bā- gives amāba-; monē- plus -bā- gives monēba-.
• The third, the -iō third and the fourth use -ēbā-. Reg- gives regēbam; capi- gives capiēbam; audi- gives audiēbam. The long e is the giveaway.

And sum, which has no stem to speak of, makes its imperfect out of era-: eram, erās, erat, erāmus, erātis, erant. You will meet this roughly once a sentence in Roman narrative.

Remember: if a Latin verb has -ba- or -eba- in the middle of it, it is in the past, and the action was going on rather than finished.

Three English tenses hiding in one Latin one

The present tense of lesson three covered three English presents. The imperfect covers at least three English pasts, and choosing between them is a real decision, not a formality.

There is a fourth use that Roman writers lean on constantly and that English has no tense for at all: the imperfect sets the scene. In a narrative, the imperfect describes what the world was like, and the perfect, which you meet next lesson, reports what happened. Trōia in Asiā erat is background. Graecī Trōiam dēlēvērunt, the Greeks destroyed Troy, would be the event. Keeping those two apart is what Module 4 is really teaching you.

Reading the paragraph properly

Go back through the Aeneas paragraph and do the grammar aloud.

• Trōia in Asiā erat. Erat is the imperfect of sum: was. In Asiā is place where, ablative.
• Graecī Trōiam oppugnābant et dēlēbant. Two first and second conjugation imperfects sharing one subject. Were attacking and destroying: a siege takes ten years, and the tense says so.
• Aenēās cum sociīs fugiēbat. Third conjugation in -iō, so -iēbā-. Cum sociīs is accompaniment, so the preposition is compulsory.
• Patrem in umerīs portābat. Patrem is accusative of a third declension noun you meet properly in Module 5.
• Nāvēs parābant et per maria nāvigābant. Plural subject carried over from sociīs, with plural verbs to match.
• Iūnō Trōiānōs nōn amābat. Trōiānōs is an adjective used as a noun: the Trojans.
• Novam patriam quaerēbat. Novam agrees with patriam, feminine accusative singular.

Roman life: a founding myth with a political job

Why did a Roman poet spend eleven years on a Trojan refugee? Because the story did work that no other story could do.

Aeneas gave Rome a past older than Greece's own classical age, and a moral one. Virgil's standing epithet for him is pius, which does not mean pious in the modern devotional sense; it means doing what you owe, to the gods, to your father, to your country, in that order and whatever it costs. The image of Aeneas walking out of a burning city with his lame father on his back is the whole idea in one picture, and Roman artists repeated it for centuries.

The story also did something more specific. Aeneas's son Ascanius is renamed Iulus, and Iulus is the ancestor the gēns Iūlia claimed: the family of Julius Caesar, and so of his adopted son Augustus, who was ruling Rome while Virgil wrote. A poem about a man obeying fate to found a city in Italy was also a poem about why the family currently in charge deserved to be.

Both things are true at once. The Aeneid is propaganda in the strict sense, commissioned into an atmosphere of official approval, and it is also the work in which a Roman asked hardest whether the cost of empire was worth paying. Read Book 4, where Aeneas leaves Dido, and decide for yourself whether the poem is comfortable about its own hero.

Common misconceptions

• The imperfect is just the past tense. Latin has three past tenses, and this is the one for actions in progress, repeated or unfinished. The perfect, next lesson, is for actions completed.
• Amabam is the first person because it ends in a vowel plus m, like a noun accusative. The -m is a personal ending, not a case ending. Outside the present tense, Latin marks I with -m rather than -ō.
• Regebam is irregular. Every third and fourth conjugation verb builds the imperfect with -ēbā-. It is a rule, not an exception, and capiēbam and audiēbam follow it too.
• Eram is a different verb from sum. It is the imperfect of sum, exactly as English was is the past of am. Irregular verbs stay irregular in the past.

English that came out of this lesson

• fugiō, flee: fugitive, refuge, subterfuge, centrifugal.
• quaerō, seek: query, inquire, require, exquisite, and conquest.
• dēleō, destroy: delete, and indelible, which cannot be deleted.
• socius, companion: social, society, associate, and the Social War Rome fought against its own allies.
• mare, sea: marine, maritime, submarine, and the Mediterranean, the sea in the middle of the land.
• arma, weapons: army, armour, armistice, and alarm, from the Italian cry meaning to arms.
• fātum, what has been spoken: fate, fatal, fatalism.
• umerus, shoulder: the humerus, the bone of the upper arm.
• teneō, hold: tenant, tenacious, retain, tenure.

What to carry forward

• The imperfect inserts -bā- after the stem of the first two conjugations and -ēbā- after the third, the third in -iō and the fourth.
• Endings outside the present: -m, -s, -t, -mus, -tis, -nt.
• Eram, erās, erat, erāmus, erātis, erant.
• Translate it as was doing, used to do or kept doing, whichever the sentence supports.
• In a narrative, the imperfect paints the background; the perfect moves the plot.

Sources

1. Allen, J. H., and Greenough, J. B. (2014). The imperfect tense. In M. Ayer (Ed.), Allen and Greenough's New Latin Grammar for Schools and Colleges. Dickinson College Commentaries. dcc.dickinson.edu
2. Virgil. (n.d.). Aeneid, Book 1, lines 1-4. The Latin Library. thelatinlibrary.com
3. Wikipedia contributors. (n.d.). Aeneid. Wikipedia. en.wikipedia.org
4. Wikipedia contributors. (n.d.). Aeneas. Wikipedia. en.wikipedia.org
5. Wiktionary contributors. (n.d.). quaero. Wiktionary. en.wiktionary.org

Three words carried on a wagon through the Forum

Suetonius, writing about a hundred and fifty years after the event, describes a placard carried among the show-wagons of one of Caesar's triumphal processions. It had three words on it. Pontico triumphō inter pompae fercula trium verbōrum praetulit titulum VENI VIDI VICI, he writes: in his Pontic triumph, among the litters of the parade, he displayed a placard of three words, I CAME, I SAW, I CONQUERED. Suetonius adds a detail people usually forget. The placard did not advertise what Caesar had done in the war. It advertised how fast he had done it: nōn acta bellī significantem sicut cēterīs, sed celeriter cōnfectī notam, not indicating the deeds of the war as the other placards did, but a mark of how quickly it was finished. The battle, at Zela in Asia Minor, was fought in 47 BC.

Three words, three verbs, and all three in the tense you are about to learn. Vēnī is from veniō, come. Vīdī is from videō, see. Vīcī is from vincō, conquer. Notice what they have in common: a long vowel and a final -ī. That -ī is the ending you meet in the next section, and the reason the phrase is so short is that Latin needs no helper words to say it. English takes six words. Latin takes three.

Here is the story this module has been heading towards, told in the same tense.

Rōmulus urbem condidit

Rōmulus et Remus geminī erant: māter Rhēa Silvia, pater (ut fāma est) Mārs. Amūlius rēx puerōs in Tiberim iēcit, sed aqua eōs nōn necāvit. Lupa puerōs invēnit et servāvit; deinde pastor eōs portāvit et ēducāvit. Ubi virī fuērunt, Amūlium interfēcērunt et novam urbem in Palātiō condidērunt. Rōmulus mūrum aedificāvit; Remus mūrum rīsit. Tum Rōmulus frātrem interfēcit et urbem Rōmam appellāvit.

Romulus and Remus were twins: their mother was Rhea Silvia, their father, so the story goes, Mars. King Amulius threw the boys into the Tiber, but the water did not kill them. A she-wolf found the boys and saved them; then a shepherd carried them off and brought them up. When they were men, they killed Amulius and founded a new city on the Palatine. Romulus built a wall; Remus laughed at the wall. Then Romulus killed his brother and called the city Rome.

Glosses: geminī twins, ut fāma est as the story goes, iaciō throw, necō kill, lupa she-wolf, inveniō find, servō save, pastor shepherd, ēducō (first conjugation) bring up, interficiō kill, condō found, mūrus wall, aedificō build, rīdeō laugh at, appellō call by a name.

Ten verbs, every one of them in the perfect, and the only ones you have seen before in this shape are erant and fuērunt. Compare the two: geminī erant, they were twins, is a state that went on, so the imperfect; ubi virī fuērunt, when they had become men, is a change that completed, so the perfect. Latin will make you choose between those two on nearly every sentence of narrative you ever read.

The procedure: cut the third principal part and add six endings

A Latin dictionary prints four forms for a verb, and they are called its principal parts. For the verb you met in lesson three they are amō, amāre, amāvī, amātum. You have been using the first two. The third is the one you need now, and it is the perfect itself, first person singular: amāvī, I loved.

The procedure has three steps and never varies.

1. Take the third principal part. amāvī.
2. Cut the final -ī. What is left is the perfect stem: amāv-.
3. Add the perfect endings -ī, -istī, -it, -imus, -istis, -ērunt.

That is the whole of it. Those six endings belong to the perfect and to no other tense, they are the same for every verb in the language including sum, and they never change. This is the only tense in Latin with its own dedicated set, and after the four conjugations of lesson nine it will feel like a holiday.

Two footnotes worth having now rather than being surprised by later. Poets and some prose writers use -ēre instead of -ērunt, so amāvēre is the same word as amāvērunt; Virgil does this constantly. And the fourth conjugation often drops the -v- in speech and in verse, giving audiī and audiit beside audīvī and audīvit. Recognise them; you do not have to write them.

The core of it: the third principal part is not extra information a dictionary throws in. It is the key to three whole tenses, and this lesson uses the first of them.

Now the awkward part: the stem itself is unpredictable

Step one of the procedure said take the third principal part. It did not say work out the third principal part, because for most verbs you cannot. The present stem tells you nothing about the perfect stem. Look at four third conjugation verbs, identical in the present system, going four different ways in the perfect.

So you learn principal parts. There is no shortcut, and pretending otherwise is how students reach the third year unable to read. The compensation is that the ways of making a perfect stem are only five, and once you know them a new verb's parts stop feeling arbitrary.

• The -v- perfect. Nearly every first conjugation verb and most fourth conjugation verbs: amō, amāvī; portō, portāvī; necō, necāvī; aedificō, aedificāvī; audiō, audīvī; dormiō, dormīvī. If a verb ends in -āre, guess -āvī and you will be right nine times in ten.
• The -u- perfect. The workhorse of the second conjugation: moneō, monuī; habeō, habuī; teneō, tenuī; timeō, timuī; doceō, docuī; and from elsewhere pōnō, posuī and aperiō, aperuī.
• The s perfect. An s is added to the stem and often fuses with the consonant in front of it: regō, rēxī; dūcō, dūxī; dīcō, dīxī; scrībō, scrīpsī; mittō, mīsī; sentiō, sēnsī; rīdeō, rīsī. The x in rēxī and dīxī is g or c plus s, exactly as in English fix.
• The lengthened or changed vowel. Nothing is added; the vowel inside the word does the work: veniō, vēnī; videō, vīdī; vincō, vīcī; agō, ēgī; faciō, fēcī; capiō, cēpī; iaciō, iēcī; fugiō, fūgī; sedeō, sēdī; legō, lēgī.
• The reduplicated perfect. A syllable is repeated at the front, a very old formation surviving in a handful of common verbs: dō, dedī; stō, stetī; currō, cucurrī; tangō, tetigī. Condō, condidī belongs here, because condō is con- plus dō, and the perfect keeps the dedī inside it: con-didī.

Some verbs simply have no marker at all and are told apart from the present by quantity alone. Respondeō, respondī is one. So is veniō, vēnī, where the only difference between present venit he comes and perfect vēnit he came is the length of the first vowel. In a text without macrons, which is every real Latin text, context is your only guide. This is one of several reasons Romans could read their own language faster than you will.

One Latin tense, three English ones

The perfect in Latin does two jobs that English keeps in separate tenses, and the choice is yours as translator.

Two warnings. First, Latin has no helper verb here. English builds have written out of two words; Latin builds scrīpsī out of one, and if you go looking for a word answering to have you will not find it. Habeō scrīptum is not how a Roman said I have written; that construction is a later development on the way to French and Italian. Second, the perfect is not the past tense. The imperfect of last lesson is also a past tense, and choosing between them is a decision about what kind of past you mean.

Read the right column downwards and you have the plot of a story. Read the left column downwards and you have the scenery. Roman historians write with both hands at once: Livy will set a scene in imperfects for three lines and then drop a single perfect into it, and the perfect is where the paragraph turns.

Reading the Romulus paragraph properly

Go back to the Latin and do the grammar aloud. Nothing here is beyond you.

• Amūlius rēx puerōs in Tiberim iēcit. Iēcit is iaciō, iacere, iēcī, a changed-vowel perfect. Puerōs is accusative plural, the thing thrown. In Tiberim is in plus the accusative, so it means into, not in: motion, not place. You met that contrast in lesson seven.
• Sed aqua eōs nōn necāvit. Necāvit is a plain first conjugation -āvī perfect. Eōs is the accusative plural of is, ea, id from lesson twelve, standing in for them.
• Lupa puerōs invēnit et servāvit. Two perfects sharing one subject, one from the changed-vowel family and one from the -v- family. Invēnit with a long e is he found; invenit with a short one would be he finds.
• Deinde pastor eōs portāvit et ēducāvit. Ēducō, ēducāre means bring up, rear, and is a different verb from ēdūcō, ēdūcere, lead out, even though both are spelt with the same seven letters in the present. The conjugation, and here the perfect ēducāvit against ēdūxit, keeps them apart.
• Ubi virī fuērunt, Amūlium interfēcērunt. Fuērunt and interfēcērunt, third person plural, the -ērunt ending twice. Interficiō is inter plus faciō, so its perfect is fēcī with the prefix: interfēcī.
• Novam urbem in Palātiō condidērunt. Novam agrees with urbem, feminine accusative singular, exactly as adjectives did in lesson eight. In Palātiō is ablative, place where.
• Remus mūrum rīsit. Rīdeō can take an object in Latin where English needs at: laughed at the wall. Rīsit is an s perfect, and the same s is in our word derision.
• Urbem Rōmam appellāvit. Two accusatives with one verb: he called the city Rome. Verbs of naming take the thing named and the name both in the accusative, which is worth remembering because it looks wrong the first time.

In Livy the killing of Remus is not about a joke. Remus jumps over the half-built wall in contempt and is cut down for it, and Livy reports a second, kinder version in which the brothers quarrel over an omen. He does not decide between them. My paragraph is a simplification made so that you could read it.

Roman life: three different dates for one founding

Ask when Rome was founded and you get three answers that have nothing to do with each other.

The first is the Romans' own. Varro, working in the late first century BC, calculated backwards through the list of consuls and the reigns of the kings and arrived at 753 BC. That date stuck. It is why Roman writers can count years ab urbe conditā, from the founding of the city, and why the abbreviation AUC appears in books about Rome. The phrase itself is a good piece of grammar: conditā is the participle of condō, and the whole thing is an ablative. A few Roman authorities used 752 instead, which tells you how firm the arithmetic was.

The second answer comes out of the ground. Excavation on the Palatine Hill has found the remains of huts dating to the ninth or eighth century BC, with building activity picking up through the early and middle eighth century, and the earliest trace of a wall there dated to between 730 and 720 BC. So there was a settlement on the hill at roughly the right time, which is a long way from there having been a Romulus. No archaeologist claims to have found him.

The third answer belongs to the most famous picture of the story, and it is the strangest. The bronze she-wolf in the Capitoline Museums has stood for the Roman founding legend for centuries and was long taken for Etruscan work of about 500 BC. In February 2007 a team at the University of Salento radiocarbon-dated organic residues from the casting cores still inside the statue and got an age of 963 plus or minus 15 years before present, which puts the casting between 1021 and 1153 AD with 95 percent confidence. The twins under her were added separately, probably in 1471 or later, and are usually given to the sculptor Antonio del Pollaiuolo. The dating is still argued about and there is no agreed replacement date. But the possibility stands that the definitive image of Rome's beginning was made about eighteen hundred years after the beginning it shows.

Bottom line: a founding story is a claim about identity before it is a claim about a year, which is exactly why Romans kept telling it and why a medieval bronze could take over the job so easily.

Common misconceptions

• The perfect endings are the ordinary person endings. They are not. -ī, -istī, -it, -imus, -istis, -ērunt belong to this tense alone. Only the third person singular -it looks familiar, and it is a trap: venit is he comes, vēnit is he came.
• You can work out the perfect from the present. You cannot. Regō gives rēxī, capiō gives cēpī, pōnō gives posuī, condō gives condidī, and all four are third conjugation. Learn the four principal parts together, out loud, as one word.
• The perfect is the Latin for the English perfect only. It covers I loved, I have loved and I did love. The first of those is its commonest job, and a narrative full of has done in English usually wants did in the translation.
• Habeo plus a participle is how Latin says I have done something. Not in the Latin of this course. Scrīpsī is one word doing what English needs two for. The habeō construction grows later and becomes the perfect of French, Spanish and Italian.
• Fui is a separate verb from sum. It is the perfect of sum, as eram was its imperfect. English does the same thing with am, was and have been.

English that came out of this lesson

• condō, condidī, found, store away: abscond, to store yourself away out of sight, and recondite, knowledge that has been put away somewhere hard to reach.
• urbs, city: urban, suburb, the settlement under the city, and urbane, which once meant simply city-bred.
• mūrus, wall: mural, a painting on one, intramural, inside the walls, and immure, to wall somebody in.
• vincō, vīcī, conquer: victor, victory, convince, convict, evict, and invincible.
• servō, save, keep: conserve, preserve, reservoir, observe. This root has nothing to do with servus, an enslaved person, which gives servile and serve; the two words only look alike.
• necō, kill, and its relative nex, violent death: internecine, a slaughter on both sides, and pernicious. The medical prefix necro- is Greek, from nekros, and is a cousin rather than a descendant.
• aedificō, build, from aedēs a building plus faciō: edifice, and edify, which once meant to build somebody up.
• appellō, appellāre, call by name: appeal, appellation, and the appellate court you call a case up to.
• lupa, she-wolf, and lupus, wolf: lupine, the festival of the Lupercalia, and the disease lupus, named in the Middle Ages from the look of the rash.
• pastor, shepherd, from pāscō, feed: pastor, pastoral, pasture, and repast.
• geminī, twins: the constellation Gemini, and gemination, the doubling of a consonant.

The takeaway

• Perfect stem: take the third principal part, cut the -ī.
• Perfect endings, used by every verb in Latin: -ī, -istī, -it, -imus, -istis, -ērunt, with -ēre as a poetic alternative to the last.
• Fuī, fuistī, fuit, fuimus, fuistis, fuērunt.
• Perfect stems are made five ways: -v-, -u-, an s, a changed vowel, or reduplication. None of them is predictable from the present, so principal parts are learned as a set of four.
• Translate a perfect as I did, I have done or I did do; the first is usually right in narrative.
• Imperfect for the scenery, perfect for the plot.

Sources

1. Allen, J. H., and Greenough, J. B. (2014). The perfect system. In M. Ayer (Ed.), Allen and Greenough's New Latin Grammar for Schools and Colleges. Dickinson College Commentaries. dcc.dickinson.edu
2. Suetonius. (n.d.). Dīvus Iūlius, 37, on the placard carried in the Pontic triumph. The Latin Library. thelatinlibrary.com
3. Livy. (n.d.). Ab Urbe Conditā, Book 1, chapters 4 to 7. The Latin Library. thelatinlibrary.com
4. Wikipedia contributors. (n.d.). Founding of Rome. Wikipedia. en.wikipedia.org
5. Wikipedia contributors. (n.d.). Capitoline Wolf. Wikipedia. en.wikipedia.org

As much land as one man could plough round in a day

Livy records what the Roman state gave Horatius Cocles: a statue set up in the comitium, and as much public land as he could plough round in one day. Then Livy adds a sentence that historians remember him for. Horatius had attempted a thing, he writes, plūs fāmae habitūram ad posterōs quam fideī, likelier to win fame with later generations than belief. The historian is telling you, in the middle of his own most famous action scene, that he does not entirely believe it.

He had reason. Polybius, writing earlier, says Horatius drowned. Dionysius of Halicarnassus says he swam the Tiber in full armour after taking a spear in the buttocks. Livy has him swim it and survive. Even the man's name is uncertain: Cocles means one-eyed, and the eye he supposedly lost may have been invented to explain a statue that was probably a figure of Vulcan before anyone attached Horatius to it. The event is dated to 508 BC, the year after the last king was thrown out, when an Etruscan army under Lars Porsena came down on the city and took the Janiculum, the hill on the wrong side of the river.

What survives from all three versions is one image: a bridge, a man on it, and axes working behind him. Here it is in Latin.

Horātius in ponte

Porsenna, rēx Etrūscōrum, Rōmam oppugnābat. Hostēs ad pontem properābant; Rōmānī fugiēbant. Sed Horātius in ponte sōlus stābat et clāmābat: "Frangite pontem!" Cīvēs pontem secūribus caedēbant; Horātius hostēs sustinēbat. Dēnique pōns cecidit. Tum Horātius in Tiberim dēsiluit et ad suōs trānāvit. Cīvitās grāta fuit: statuam in comitiō posuit et agrōs Horātiō dedit.

Porsenna, king of the Etruscans, was attacking Rome. The enemy were hurrying towards the bridge; the Romans were running away. But Horatius was standing alone on the bridge and shouting: break the bridge! The citizens were cutting at the bridge with axes; Horatius was holding off the enemy. At last the bridge fell. Then Horatius leapt down into the Tiber and swam across to his own people. The state was grateful: it set up a statue in the comitium and gave Horatius fields.

Glosses: hostis enemy, pōns bridge, properō hurry, sōlus alone, frangō break, cīvis citizen, secūris axe, caedō cut, sustineō hold off, dēnique finally, cadō fall, dēsiliō leap down, trānō swim across, suōs his own people, cīvitās the citizen body, the state, grātus grateful, comitium the assembly place in the Forum.

Read the paragraph again and watch only the verb endings. Six of them carry -ba-. Five of them do not. And the change happens at exactly one point in the story.

Where the tense turns, and why

Line the verbs up in the order they come.

That is not a stylistic preference. It is how Latin narrative is built, and a Roman reader would have felt the switch at cecidit the way you feel a cut in a film. The technical name for what the two tenses are choosing between is aspect: not when something happened, but how it is being presented. Both of these tenses are past. Only one of them says finished.

Why this matters: when you translate Latin narrative and every verb comes out as a flat English past, you have thrown away information the Latin was carrying. Caedēbant is not they cut. It is they were hacking away at it, and the reason it matters is that Horatius is still standing there while they do.

Four tests for when you cannot decide

Composing your own Latin is where the choice gets hard, because English often hides it. Here are four questions to ask, in order.

1. Could you put was doing or used to do in the English? If yes, imperfect. The Romans were running away and the boys used to sit in school both take it. If was doing sounds wrong, that is a signal for the perfect.
2. Is this one event that moves the story to its next state? Perfect. The bridge fell; Romulus founded the city; the she-wolf saved the boys. These are the sentences a plot summary would keep.
3. Is it a description, a circumstance, or a state of affairs? Imperfect. Verbs of being, having, wanting and being able live there almost permanently: erat, habēbat, volēbat, poterat. Rōmulus multōs virōs habēbat, Romulus had many men, is scenery for what he does next.
4. Does the sentence say how long, or how often? A stated stretch of time that is over takes the perfect: decem annōs bellum gessērunt, they waged war for ten years, the whole ten years boxed up as one finished thing. A word like saepe often or semper always pulls the imperfect instead.

One honest warning. Real authors break these tests for effect. Livy will drop a present tense into a past narrative to make you feel you are there, a trick called the historic present, and you will meet it the moment you read unadapted Latin. The tests are for reading well and writing correctly, not for policing Livy.

Two more stories, two more tense shapes

The same machinery, on the two other legends every Roman schoolchild had by heart. First, how Rome got wives, which is not a comfortable story.

Rōmulus multōs virōs habēbat, sed fēminās nōn habēbat. Itaque Sabīnōs ad lūdōs invītāvit. Ubi Sabīnī spectābant, Rōmānī puellās rapuērunt. Sabīnī bellum parāvērunt. Sed fēminae inter patrēs et marītōs cucurrērunt et pācem ōrāvērunt.

Romulus had many men, but he did not have women. And so he invited the Sabines to games. While the Sabines were watching, the Romans seized the girls. The Sabines got ready for war. But the women ran in between their fathers and their husbands and begged for peace.

Glosses: itaque and so, invītō invite, lūdī games, rapiō seize, bellum war, marītus husband, currō run, pāx peace, ōrō beg for. Notice the shape: two imperfects of having, an imperfect for the watching that was going on when something cut across it, then four perfects in a row as the plot fires. Ubi plus an imperfect, while they were watching, is a standard Latin way of saying that one action interrupted another.

Now the story Romans liked best about themselves.

Cincinnātus agrum suum arābat. Nūntiī ex urbe vēnērunt: "Rōma tē vocat." Togam induit, ad urbem properāvit, mīlitēs parāvit, hostēs vīcit. Deinde ad arātrum suum rediit.

Cincinnatus was ploughing his own field. Messengers came from the city: Rome is calling you. He put on his toga, hurried to the city, got soldiers ready, defeated the enemy. Then he went back to his own plough.

Glosses: arō plough, nūntius messenger, toga toga, induō put on, mīles soldier, arātrum plough, redeō go back. One imperfect, and then five perfects with no conjunctions between them. Latin does that when it wants speed, and the whole point of the Cincinnatus story is speed: the man was in the field, then in command, then back in the field.

In short: a Latin paragraph tells you its own structure through its tenses. Imperfects are the stage; perfects are the things that happen on it.

One vowel apart

Several perfects are identical to their own present tense except for the length of a vowel, and because no Roman ever wrote macrons, this is a real reading problem rather than a curiosity. Four common pairs:

The last row is the meanest, because both forms are perfects of different verbs, and one long vowel is the difference between a man falling over and a man being killed. Roman readers handled it the way you handle English read and read: by knowing where the sentence is going. When you meet these in this course the macrons will be there. When you read Caesar in your second year they will not, and that is the point at which grammar stops being an exercise.

Roman life: three stories, three virtues, and a city in Ohio

None of these three tales is history in the sense a modern historian means. All three are moral instruction, and each one teaches a different thing.

Horatius on the bridge is about virtūs, which is not virtue: it is what a vir is supposed to be, courage of the most public and physical kind. The reward proves the point. The Romans did not give him money. They gave him a statue where everybody would see it and land he had to plough himself.

The Sabine women story is about concordia, agreement, and it is told with a bad conscience. Rome begins with an abduction; the peace comes from the women themselves, running into the space between the two armies. Roman writers kept the ugly beginning in, and it is worth asking why a state would preserve a founding story that makes its founders look like that.

Cincinnatus is about the citizen who does not want power. Livy says he farmed four iugera across the Tiber, in a place still called the prāta Quinctia, the Quinctian meadows, and that the envoys found him either digging a ditch leaning on his spade or ploughing, he does not know which, but certainly at farm work. He was asked to put on his toga to hear the Senate's message. As dictator in 458 BC he relieved a trapped Roman army and beat the Aequi at Mount Algidus, and then gave up an office he could have held for six months after about fifteen days.

That last story travelled furthest. In 1783 Henry Knox founded the Society of the Cincinnati for officers of the Continental Army, on the idea that they too were farmers who had put down the plough and would pick it up again; George Washington, who resigned his commission and went home to Mount Vernon, was called the American Cincinnatus. The city of Cincinnati, Ohio, is named after the society. A Roman moral fable about a man with four iugera ended up on a map of the Midwest.

Common misconceptions

• The imperfect and the perfect are two ways of saying the same thing. They are two different claims about the same event. Pontem caedēbant leaves the bridge standing; pontem frēgērunt, they broke the bridge, would mean it is down. In this story the difference is everything.
• English past tense equals Latin perfect. Often, but not reliably. English uses one simple past for was standing and stood, and Latin makes you choose. When your English has a was or a used to hiding in it, the Latin wants the imperfect.
• Cecidit must be from caedo, since they look the same. Cecidit with a short i is from cadō, fall. Cecīdit with a long one is from caedō, cut down. Both are reduplicated perfects, which is why they collided.
• Livy is reporting what happened. Livy is reporting what Romans said had happened, roughly five hundred years later, and he says so. He flags the swim as more famous than believable, and he does not know whether Cincinnatus was digging or ploughing.

English that came out of this lesson

• pōns, pontis, bridge: pontoon, and pontiff, from pontifex, bridge-maker, the title the pope still carries.
• cīvis, citizen, and cīvitās, the citizen body: civic, civil, civilian, city, and civilisation.
• frangō, break: fracture, fragment, fragile, fraction, and infringe.
• cadō, fall: cadence, accident, something that falls your way, decadence, and cascade.
• caedō, cut, kill: homicide, incision, concise, decide, which is to cut a question off.
• currō, run: current, curriculum, a running-track, occur, excursion, courier.
• pāx, pācis, peace: pacify, pacific, appease, and a pact, the agreement that makes peace.
• hostis, enemy: hostile, hostility. The unrelated hospes, guest, gives hospital and hotel, so do not join them up.
• rapiō, seize: rapid, rapture, ravish, rapacious, and surreptitious.
• arō, plough, and arātrum, a plough: arable land, the land you can plough.
• mīles, mīlitis, soldier: military, militia, militant.

Looking back

• Imperfect for what was going on, was repeated, or was the state of things; perfect for what happened and finished.
• In narrative the imperfect builds the scene and the perfect turns it. Find the perfect and you have found the plot.
• Four tests: does English want was doing; is it one story-moving event; is it a description or state; does the sentence give a finished stretch of time.
• Verbs of being, having, wanting and being able sit in the imperfect almost by default.
• Ubi plus an imperfect means while that was going on, and usually something in the perfect cuts across it.
• Watch vowel length: venit and vēnit, legit and lēgit, fugit and fūgit, cecidit and cecīdit.

Sources

1. Livy. (n.d.). Ab Urbe Conditā, Book 2, chapter 10, on Horatius at the bridge. The Latin Library. thelatinlibrary.com
2. Livy. (n.d.). Ab Urbe Conditā, Book 3, chapters 26 to 29, on Cincinnatus and the four iugera of the prata Quinctia. The Latin Library. thelatinlibrary.com
3. Allen, J. H., and Greenough, J. B. (2014). The imperfect tense. In M. Ayer (Ed.), Allen and Greenough's New Latin Grammar for Schools and Colleges. Dickinson College Commentaries. dcc.dickinson.edu
4. Wikipedia contributors. (n.d.). Horatius Cocles. Wikipedia. en.wikipedia.org
5. Wikipedia contributors. (n.d.). Lucius Quinctius Cincinnatus. Wikipedia. en.wikipedia.org

A problem your two declensions cannot solve

In 70 BC Cicero told a Roman jury about a flogging. Caedēbātur virgīs in mediō forō Messānae cīvis Rōmānus, iūdicēs, cum interea nūllus gemitus, nūlla vōx alia illīus miserī inter dolōrem crepitumque plāgārum audiēbātur nisi haec, "Cīvis Rōmānus sum." A Roman citizen was being beaten with rods in the middle of the forum at Messana, gentlemen of the jury, while meanwhile no groan, no other word from that wretched man could be heard through the pain and the crack of the blows except this: I am a Roman citizen.

You can hear the imperfect doing its work there. Caedēbātur and audiēbātur are not finished actions; they go on and on, which is the horror of the sentence. But look at the nouns. Cīvis, citizen. Iūdicēs, jurymen. Vōx, voice. Dolōrem, pain. Not one of them belongs to either of the declensions you know. Cīvis is not puella and not servus. Vōx is not anything you have seen. And when you look up the genitive of vōx you find vōcis, with a c that was not in the word a moment ago.

That is the problem this lesson solves, and it is the single biggest piece of Latin left in the course. The third declension holds more nouns than the first and second put together, including almost every abstract word a Roman needed: lēx law, pāx peace, virtūs courage, lībertās freedom, tempus time, nōmen name. You cannot read a sentence of real Latin without it. Start with a scene you can already read.

In forō

Gāius Valerius cum fīliō in forō ambulat. Ibi multī hominēs sunt: mercātōrēs, mīlitēs, iūdicēs. Mārcus rogat: "Quis est, pater?" Gāius respondet: "Cōnsul est. Cōnsul lēgēs cūrat et urbem regit." Subitō Mārcus vōcēs et clāmōrem audit: mīlitēs per forum properant. Pater fīlium manū tenet. "Manē, Mārce," inquit; "hīc perīculum est."

Gaius Valerius is walking in the forum with his son. There are many people there: merchants, soldiers, jurymen. Marcus asks: who is that, father? Gaius answers: it is the consul. The consul looks after the laws and governs the city. Suddenly Marcus hears voices and a shout: soldiers are hurrying through the forum. The father holds his son by the hand. Wait, Marcus, he says; there is danger here.

Glosses: ambulō walk, homō person, mercātor merchant, iūdex juryman, judge, cōnsul consul, lēx law, cūrō look after, subitō suddenly, vōx voice, clāmor shout, manū by the hand, hīc here, perīculum danger.

Eight third declension nouns in five sentences, and you read every one of them without a table: hominēs, mercātōrēs, mīlitēs, iūdicēs, cōnsul, lēgēs, vōcēs, clāmōrem. The endings did the work. Now find out what they were.

The nominative lies; the genitive tells the truth

In the first two declensions the nominative gives you everything. Puella tells you the stem is puell-; servus tells you serv-. In the third declension the nominative has usually been squashed by centuries of Roman mouths, and what is left may not contain the stem at all. The genitive singular does, every time. Cut the -is off it.

This is why a Latin dictionary prints two forms for every noun, and why a vocabulary list that gives you only rēx, king has cheated you. Learn rēx, rēgis as one item, the way you learned amō, amāre, amāvī as one item. From iter, itineris you get itinerary; from rēx, rēgis you get regal; and in both cases it is the genitive, not the nominative, that English borrowed.

Key idea: the third declension is not irregular. Its stems are perfectly regular; it is the nominative singular that has been worn down, and the genitive is where you go to see the word intact.

The endings, and the two shapes they come in

Once you have the stem, one set of endings does almost all of it. Here are four nouns: a consonant stem masculine, a consonant stem neuter, an i-stem, and an i-stem neuter.

Five things to notice, and then you own the table.

• The core endings are -is, -ī, -em, -e and -ēs, -um, -ibus, -ēs, -ibus. That is the whole consonant-stem declension. The nominative singular is not in the list because it is unpredictable, which is why you learn it separately.
• The neuter rule from lesson six still holds. A neuter noun has the same form for nominative and accusative, and its plural of both ends in -a. Nōmen is nominative or accusative singular; nōmina is nominative or accusative plural. You never have to ask which case a neuter subject or object is in, only which.
• The i-stems differ in one place that matters: the genitive plural is -ium. Cīvium, of the citizens; urbium, of the cities; mārium would be wrong for sea only because the vowel is short, so marium. Which nouns are i-stems? Two useful signs: a noun with the same number of syllables in the nominative and the genitive (cīvis, cīvis; hostis, hostis; nāvis, nāvis), and a noun whose stem ends in two consonants (urbs, urbis; nox, noctis; mōns, montis).
• Neuter i-stems go further. Nouns in -e, -al and -ar take -ī in the ablative singular and -ia in the plural: mare, marī, maria, marium; animal, animālī, animālia, animālium. There are not many of them, and mare and animal are the two you will actually meet.
• The vocative is the same as the nominative. All of it, singular and plural. After the -e and -ī of lesson five this is a relief: Ō rēx, o king, needs no thought at all.

One genuine ambiguity is worth naming now rather than discovering in a translation. Cīvis is both nominative and genitive singular, and rēgēs is both nominative and accusative plural. Latin lives with a certain amount of this, and word order plus sense sorts it out. Rēgēs cīvēs timent is ambiguous on the page; a Roman would expect the subject first and read it as the kings fear the citizens.

Guessing the gender, and when not to

Third declension gender has to be learned, because unlike the first and second declensions the ending does not settle it. But the endings do give you odds worth taking.

Two of those are worth a warning. Arbor, tree, ends in -or and is feminine anyway; and corpus and tempus end in -us, which in the second declension was a strong signal for masculine, and here means neuter. That last trap catches everybody once. Tempus longum est, the time is long, takes a neuter adjective, not longus.

Nouns naming men and women follow the person, whatever the ending: pater is masculine, māter is feminine, soror is feminine despite the -or. And a few nouns, cīvis among them, are simply both: a cīvis can be a citizen of either sex, and the adjective beside it tells you which is meant.

Twelve sentences to make it stick

• Rēx lēgēs dat. The king gives laws. Nominative subject, accusative object, both third declension.
• Cīvēs rēgem nōn amābant. The citizens did not love the king. Nominative plural, accusative singular.
• Nōmen rēgis erat Tarquinius. The king's name was Tarquinius. Genitive of belonging, from lesson six.
• Mīlitibus pecūniam dedit. He gave money to the soldiers. Dative plural in -ibus.
• Cum mīlitibus ad urbem vēnit. He came to the city with soldiers. Ablative plural, accompaniment, so cum is compulsory.
• Iūdicēs vōcem hominis audiēbant. The jurymen were listening to the man's voice. Two accusatives to sort out, and the genitive hominis settles it.
• Tempora mūtantur. The times change. Neuter plural subject; you will meet this as a proverb.
• Corpus in marī erat. The body was in the sea. Neuter nominative, and the i-stem ablative marī.
• Iter longum fuit. The journey was long. Iter is neuter, so the adjective is longum.
• Rōma caput orbis erat. Rome was the head of the world. Predicate nominative from lesson ten, with orbis in the genitive.
• Sine pāce urbs nōn valet. Without peace a city has no strength. Sine plus ablative.
• Virtūs mīlitum urbem servāvit. The soldiers' courage saved the city. Genitive plural mīlitum, and a perfect from last lesson.

The upshot: nothing in those twelve sentences needed a new rule about cases. The five cases do what they have always done. Only the endings that express them are new.

Roman life: what cīvis Rōmānus sum actually bought you

The man in Cicero's story was not shouting about pride. He was making a legal claim, and everyone in the forum knew it. Roman law from the early second century BC forbade the flogging or torture of a citizen; a citizen could appeal, and in a capital case could often take exile instead of execution. When Verres had him beaten anyway, the outrage was not that a man was hurt. It was that a magistrate had treated a citizen as though he were not one. Cicero prosecuted Verres in 70 BC and won; Verres left for exile before the case finished.

Citizenship was also the political question of the age. Rome's Italian allies fought it and Rome for it in the Social War of 91 to 87 BC, and the lex Iūlia of 90 BC gave citizen rights to the Latin and allied communities that had stayed loyal. From then the category kept widening, until in AD 212 the emperor Caracalla issued the edict known as the Constitutio Antoniniana, granting citizenship to essentially all free inhabitants of the empire. Cassius Dio, who lived through it, says the motive was tax: non-citizens were exempt from several duties that citizens paid. Modern historians add military recruitment and the tidying up of provincial law. Whatever the reason, a status that a man in Messana was flogged for claiming became, in one document, the default condition of about thirty million people.

There is a grammatical footnote in that, and it is not trivial. Cīvis is a third declension noun that does not mark sex, and Roman citizenship for women was real but partial: no vote, no office, but property rights, legal standing and, after Caracalla's edict, the same formal grant. The language and the law match each other more closely than you might expect.

Common misconceptions

• The third declension is the irregular one. It is the largest and most regular one. What varies is only the nominative singular, and that is why the genitive is printed beside it.
• Corpus and tempus are masculine, because -us was masculine in the second declension. Both are neuter. Second declension -us and third declension -us are different endings that happen to look alike, and corpus, corporis against servus, servī shows it in the genitive.
• You can tell an i-stem by looking at it. Sometimes: equal syllables in nominative and genitive, or a stem ending in two consonants. But pater, patris has a two-consonant stem and is not an i-stem, giving patrum and not patrium. The genitive plural is the form to check and to learn.
• Civis must be masculine because it names a citizen. It is masculine or feminine according to the person meant. The same is true of parēns and sacerdōs.
• Rex has no vocative. It has one, and it is rēx. In the third declension the vocative is always identical to the nominative, singular and plural.

English that came out of this lesson

• rēx, rēgis, king: regal, regicide, regent, and through French royal and viceroy.
• lēx, lēgis, law: legal, legislate, legitimate, and privilege, from prīvus plus lēx, a law made for one person.
• vōx, vōcis, voice: vocal, vocation, vowel, advocate, vociferous.
• corpus, corporis, body: corpse, corporal, corporation, corpuscle, and a corps of soldiers.
• tempus, temporis, time: temporary, contemporary, extempore, and the grammatical word tense, worn down through French from tempus itself.
• nōmen, nōminis, name: nominate, nominal, noun, denomination, and ignominy, the loss of your good name.
• caput, capitis, head: capital, captain, decapitate, per capita, and chapter, from the diminutive capitulum.
• homō, hominis, human being: human, homicide, hominid, and the species name Homo sapiens. It does not mean man in the sense of male; that word is vir.
• iter, itineris, journey: itinerary, itinerant, and reiterate, to go over a thing again.
• iūdex, iūdicis, judge: judicial, judicious, adjudicate, prejudice, a judgement made in advance.
• lūx, lūcis, light, and nox, noctis, night: lucid, translucent, elucidate; nocturnal, nocturne, and equinox, when night equals day.
• opus, operis, work: opera, operate, cooperate, and magnum opus.

What to remember

• Get the stem from the genitive singular by cutting -is. Learn nominative and genitive together, always.
• Consonant stem endings: -is, -ī, -em, -e; -ēs, -um, -ibus, -ēs, -ibus.
• Neuters keep nominative and accusative identical and end both plurals in -a.
• I-stems take -ium in the genitive plural: cīvium, urbium, montium.
• Neuters in -e, -al and -ar add -ī in the ablative singular and -ia, -ium in the plural.
• The vocative equals the nominative throughout.
• Gender is learned, but -or and -ex lean masculine, -tās, -tūs, -iō and -x lean feminine, and -us, -men, -e lean neuter.

Sources

1. Allen, J. H., and Greenough, J. B. (2014). 3rd declension: classes. In M. Ayer (Ed.), Allen and Greenough's New Latin Grammar for Schools and Colleges. Dickinson College Commentaries. dcc.dickinson.edu
2. Allen, J. H., and Greenough, J. B. (2014). 3rd declension: gender. In M. Ayer (Ed.), Allen and Greenough's New Latin Grammar. Dickinson College Commentaries. dcc.dickinson.edu
3. Cicero. (n.d.). In Verrem, II.5.162. The Latin Library. thelatinlibrary.com
4. Wikipedia contributors. (n.d.). Roman citizenship. Wikipedia. en.wikipedia.org
5. Wikipedia contributors. (n.d.). Constitutio Antoniniana. Wikipedia. en.wikipedia.org

The first sentence of Latin prose most people ever read

Gallia est omnis dīvīsa in partēs trēs, quārum ūnam incolunt Belgae, aliam Aquītānī, tertiam quī ipsōrum linguā Celtae, nostrā Gallī appellantur. Gaul, taken as a whole, is divided into three parts, of which the Belgae inhabit one, the Aquitani another, and the third is inhabited by the people who in their own language are called Celts, in ours Gauls.

Caesar wrote that between 58 and 49 BC, while he was in the middle of conquering the country he is describing, and for two centuries it has been the sentence schoolboys were made to translate first. The word that matters for this lesson is the third one. Omnis means all, whole, every, and it is an adjective, and it is not bonus, bona, bonum. You cannot decline it with anything you know. Neither can you decline trēs, or partēs, though after last lesson you can at least see that partēs is third declension.

So there is a second family of adjectives, and it uses the endings you learned for third declension nouns. Here is a night in the Valerius house to meet them in.

Nox in vīllā

Nox erat. Omnēs in vīllā dormiēbant, sed Fīdus nōn dormiēbat. Canis fortis clāmōrem audīvit: ingēns sonus in hortō erat. Dāvus, servus fidēlis, lucernam cēpit et in hortum properāvit. Ibi nihil vīdit: omnia tranquilla erant. Sed Fīdus adhūc lātrābat, quia fēlēs in arbore sedēbat.

It was night. Everybody in the house was asleep, but Fidus was not asleep. The brave dog heard a noise: there was a huge sound in the garden. Davus, a faithful slave, picked up a lamp and hurried into the garden. There he saw nothing: everything was quiet. But Fidus was still barking, because a cat was sitting in the tree.

Glosses: omnēs everybody, canis dog, fortis brave, ingēns huge, sonus sound, fidēlis faithful, lucerna lamp, nihil nothing, omnia everything, tranquillus quiet, adhūc still, lātrō bark, quia because, fēlēs cat, arbor tree.

Four third declension adjectives in there, and two of them are doing something you should notice. Omnēs and omnia have no noun beside them: Latin lets an adjective stand on its own as a noun, so omnēs is all the people and omnia is all the things. English does it too, in the few and the good, but Latin does it constantly.

Two adjective systems, side by side

This is the comparison the whole lesson rests on. The left column is the adjective family from lesson eight, which borrows the first and second declensions. The right is the new one, which borrows the third.

Read the right half again and notice how little there is to learn.

• Masculine and feminine are identical everywhere. One column does the work of two. Mīles fortis and fēmina fortis use the same word.
• The neuter differs in exactly three places: nominative singular forte, accusative singular forte, and the plural fortia for both. Everything else is shared with the masculine and feminine.
• The ablative singular is -ī, not -e. This is the one ending that differs from the nouns you learned last lesson, where rēge had an -e. Adjectives are consistent i-stems, and nouns are not. Cum mīlite fortī, with a brave soldier: -e on the noun, -ī on the adjective, in the same phrase. It looks wrong and it is right.
• Genitive plural -ium, neuter plural -ia. The i-stem markings, again without exception.

Worth holding on to: a third declension adjective has thirteen distinct forms, against the twenty or so of bonus. The new family is smaller work than the old one.

Three shapes, told apart by what the dictionary prints

A dictionary gives you either two forms or one plus a genitive, and that tells you which of three classes you are holding.

The two-termination class is by far the biggest, and if you learn fortis you have learned hundreds of words. The three-termination class has about a dozen members worth knowing, and they behave like fortis in every form except the masculine nominative singular: ācer, ācris, ācre, then ācris, ācrī, ācrem, ācrī for masculine and feminine alike.

The one-termination class needs its own look, because the nominative hides the stem exactly as third declension nouns did.

One footnote for when you start reading poetry: the -ns adjectives are really present participles pressed into service as adjectives, and when a writer uses one as a participle proper, meaning while doing something, the ablative singular is -e rather than -ī. You do not need this now. You will need it in your second year, and you will remember that you were warned.

Agreement does not mean rhyming

Here is where most beginners lose marks, and the fix is one sentence: an adjective agrees with its noun in case, number and gender, and never in declension. The adjective keeps its own endings. It just has to pick the ones that carry the same case, number and gender as the noun.

Work through the table slowly. The left half puts a first and second declension adjective on nouns of three declensions; the right half does the same with a third declension adjective.

Five of those twelve phrases have endings that do not resemble each other, and all twelve are correct. Urbs fortis is a strong city; urbs magna is a big one; and there is no version of either in which the two words look alike. A Roman heard the case, not the rhyme.

The trickiest combinations are the ablatives, so here they are written out: cum mīlite fortī with a brave soldier, in urbe magnā in a big city, ingentī cum clāmōre with a huge shout, brevī tempore in a short time. That last one is a set phrase you will meet dozens of times, and both words are third declension with different endings.

So what?: once you stop expecting endings to match, Latin gets easier, not harder, because you start reading the ending for what it says instead of for what it looks like.

Sentences to practise on

• Mīlitēs fortēs urbem servāvērunt. Brave soldiers saved the city.
• Omnēs cīvēs rēgem timēbant. All the citizens feared the king.
• Ingentem clāmōrem audīvimus. We heard a huge shout.
• Iter breve nōn erat. The journey was not short. Iter is neuter, so breve.
• Dāvus est servus fidēlis. Davus is a faithful slave. Predicate nominative from lesson ten.
• Cum mīlite fortī ambulābat. He was walking with a brave soldier.
• Omnia tranquilla erant. Everything was quiet. An adjective standing as a noun, neuter plural.
• Vōx dulcis puellae omnēs dēlectābat. The girl's sweet voice was delighting everybody.
• Tempora difficilia sunt. The times are difficult. Neuter plural of both noun and adjective.
• Rēx potēns lēgēs gravēs dedit. The powerful king gave harsh laws.

Two of those repay a second look. In vōx dulcis puellae, English has to decide whether sweet goes with voice or with girl, and Latin has already decided: dulcis is nominative, so it must belong to vōx, while puellae is genitive and stands apart. And in lēgēs gravēs, both words end in -ēs, which happens sometimes; it is a coincidence, not the rule at work.

Roman life: reading the sentence you just translated with your eyes open

Caesar's opening line is not neutral geography. It is the first move in a long argument, made by the man who profited from the answer.

The Commentāriī dē Bellō Gallicō are eight books, seven by Caesar and the eighth added by his officer Aulus Hirtius after Caesar's death in 44 BC. They were written during the campaigning years, 58 to 49 BC, and in circulation by 46 BC, when Cicero praised them. Caesar narrates his own war in the third person, calling himself Caesar throughout, which reads as objectivity and is a technique. The Roman public he was writing for included the voters and senators who would decide whether his command had been legal and whether he should have another one.

The numbers are the place to be careful. Caesar reports that of 368,000 Helvetii who set out, only 110,000 survived. Modern historians generally think the real figure was between 20,000 and 50,000 and that he inflated it. Plutarch and Appian, writing much later, give totals of a million Gauls killed and more than a million enslaved, with eight hundred villages destroyed; the historian David Henige treats all such ancient figures as not credible. Something enormous happened in Gaul between 58 and 50 BC, and the only detailed account of it was written by the general who did it and needed it to look necessary.

None of that makes the Latin less worth reading. It makes it worth reading properly. When you meet Gallia est omnis dīvīsa in partēs trēs in your second year, the word to press on is not omnis but dīvīsa: divided by whom, and according to whom?

Common misconceptions

• An adjective must have the same ending as its noun. It must have the same case, number and gender. Urbs fortis, mīles magnus and brevī tempore are all correct and none of them rhymes.
• Fortis is masculine and forte is feminine. Fortis serves masculine and feminine together; forte is the neuter. Two-termination adjectives have two forms because they have three genders and one of them shares.
• The ablative singular of a third declension adjective ends in -e, like the nouns. It ends in -ī: fortī, ingentī, omnī. Nouns and adjectives part company at exactly this point.
• Ingens has no feminine, since only one form is printed. It has one form that covers all three genders in the nominative singular. That is what one termination means, and the printed genitive ingentis is there to give you the stem.
• Omnes and omnia need a noun. They do not. A Latin adjective can stand as a noun: omnēs everybody, omnia everything, multī many people, bona goods.

English that came out of this lesson

• fortis, brave, strong: fort, fortitude, fortify, force, comfort, and the musical forte.
• omnis, all: omnibus, a vehicle for everybody, shortened to bus; omnipotent, omniscient, omnivore.
• ingēns, huge: rare in English directly, but the related gēns, gentis, clan, gives gentile, genteel and gentry.
• fidēlis, faithful: fidelity, infidel, bona fide, and the dog's name Fido, which is why Davus's dog in this course is called Fidus.
• brevis, short: brief, abbreviate, brevity, and the musical breve.
• gravis, heavy, serious: grave, gravity, aggravate, grief.
• dulcis, sweet: dulcet, and dulcimer.
• facilis, easy, from faciō: facile, facility, facilitate, and difficult, which is dis- plus facilis, not easy.
• potēns, powerful: potent, potential, omnipotent, despot.
• sapiēns, wise: sapient, sage, and Homo sapiens, the wise human.
• ācer, keen, sharp: acrid, acrimony, eager, and vinegar, from vīnum plus ācre, sharp wine.
• fēlīx, lucky, fruitful: felicity, felicitate, and the name Felix.

Summing up

• Third declension adjectives use third declension endings, with -ī in the ablative singular, -ium in the genitive plural and -ia in the neuter plural.
• Masculine and feminine are the same throughout; the neuter differs only in the nominative and accusative.
• Three classes: three terminations (ācer, ācris, ācre), two terminations (fortis, forte), one termination (ingēns, ingentis). The dictionary entry tells you which.
• Agreement is in case, number and gender, never in declension. Urbs fortis and brevī tempore are correct.
• An adjective with no noun can be a noun: omnēs everybody, omnia everything.

Sources

1. Allen, J. H., and Greenough, J. B. (2014). 3rd declension adjectives: classification and paradigms. In M. Ayer (Ed.), Allen and Greenough's New Latin Grammar for Schools and Colleges. Dickinson College Commentaries. dcc.dickinson.edu
2. Caesar. (n.d.). Commentāriī dē Bellō Gallicō, Book 1, chapter 1. The Latin Library. thelatinlibrary.com
3. Wikipedia contributors. (n.d.). Commentarii de Bello Gallico. Wikipedia. en.wikipedia.org
4. Wikipedia contributors. (n.d.). Gallic Wars. Wikipedia. en.wikipedia.org
5. Wiktionary contributors. (n.d.). ingens. Wiktionary. en.wiktionary.org

Four Latin prepositional phrases you have used in English this year

A court issues a subpoena. The word is two Latin words, sub poenā, under penalty, and the -ā at the end of poenā is an ablative singular of the first declension. English kept the case ending and forgot it was one. Three more, all of them alive in ordinary English: ad hoc, for this, where hoc is accusative; per capita, by heads, accusative plural of the neuter caput from lesson sixteen; in absentiā, in absence, ablative again.

Put them side by side and a pattern falls out. Sub and in here take the ablative. Ad and per take the accusative. That is not decoration. In Latin a preposition governs a case, meaning it requires the noun after it to be in that case, and getting it wrong is the commonest single error a beginner makes in written Latin. So let us start with the error.

Debugging a sentence a real student wrote

Here is a line offered as Latin for the boy hurries into the house.

Puer in vīllā properat.

Every word is a real Latin word. The verb is right, the subject is right, the preposition is right, and the sentence means something quite different from what was intended: the boy is hurrying about inside the house. He is already in it. The error is one letter.

Here is why. In is one of a small group of prepositions that takes either case, and the case carries the meaning.

• In plus the accusative means motion: into, onto. Puer in vīllam properat, the boy hurries into the house.
• In plus the ablative means position: in, on. Puer in vīllā properat, the boy hurries about in the house.

Now trace the reasoning that produced the mistake, because it is a good piece of reasoning that stopped one step early. The student knew from lesson seven that place where is ablative: in hortō, in the garden. True. The student then treated in as a word that simply takes the ablative. But in is not a word that takes a case. It is a word that takes two, and chooses between them according to whether anything is moving. The test is a question you ask the verb, not the noun: is something going somewhere? If yes, accusative.

Sub works the same way. Sub arbore sedet, he is sitting under a tree, position, ablative. Sub arborem currit, he runs in under a tree, motion, accusative. So does super, over, which you will meet less often.

Remember: for in and sub, the case is not a property of the preposition. It is a report on whether the sentence contains movement.

Ad balnea

A short scene with nine prepositions in it. Read it once for the story, then again counting the cases.

Post cēnam Mārcus cum patre ad balnea ambulat. Iter per forum et prope templum dūcit. In balneīs multī hominēs sunt: aliī in aquā calidā sedent, aliī prope ignem stant. Mārcus ē tepidāriō in caldārium intrat, deinde ex aquā calidā in aquam frīgidam dēsilit. Post balnea ad vīllam cum patre redit. Ante iānuam Fīdus exspectat.

After dinner Marcus walks to the baths with his father. The route leads through the forum and past the temple. There are many people in the baths: some are sitting in hot water, others are standing near the fire. Marcus goes from the warm room into the hot room, then leaps out of the hot water into cold water. After the baths he goes back to the house with his father. Fidus is waiting in front of the door.

Glosses: cēna dinner, balnea the baths, templum temple, aliī ... aliī some ... others, calidus hot, ignis fire, tepidārium the warm room, caldārium the hot room, frīgidus cold, dēsiliō leap, exspectō wait for.

Now the cases. Post cēnam, ad balnea, per forum, prope templum, prope ignem, in caldārium, in aquam frīgidam, ad vīllam, ante iānuam: nine accusatives. Cum patre, in balneīs, in aquā calidā, ē tepidāriō, ex aquā calidā: five ablatives. And notice the pair in one sentence: ex aquā calidā in aquam frīgidam, out of the hot water into the cold. Out of takes the ablative because the water is where he was; into takes the accusative because the water is where he is going.

The lists, which are shorter than you fear

Almost every Latin preposition takes the accusative. The ablative group is small and worth learning as a set, because once you know it, everything not in it takes the accusative.

Two small spelling rules that Romans applied by ear. Ā and ē stand before a consonant, ab and ex before a vowel: ā vīllā but ab urbe, ē vīllā but ex urbe. With ex the rule is loose and you will see it before consonants often. The reason is simply that a urbe and e urbe are unpleasant to say, which is the reason behind a great many Latin rules.

Three places a beginner puts in a preposition that Latin does not want

Latin cases already carry meanings that English expresses with prepositions, so an English speaker over-supplies them. Three habits to break.

1. To somebody after a verb of giving is the dative, with no preposition. Puellae librum dat, he gives the book to the girl. Not ad puellam. Save ad for real motion towards a place: ad urbem. You learned the dative in lesson seven; this is the rule it was waiting for.
2. With a tool or a means is the bare ablative, with no cum. Gladiō pugnat, he fights with a sword. Secūribus pontem caedēbant, they were cutting the bridge with axes, from the Horatius passage two lessons ago. Cum is only for company: cum patre ambulat. Ask yourself whether the thing after with could walk beside you. A father can; an axe cannot.
3. Names of towns and a few household words take no preposition at all. Rōmam vēnit, he came to Rome, accusative alone. Rōmā discessit, he left Rome, ablative alone. And to say at Rome, Latin uses an old case, the locative: Rōmae. The same three shapes work for home: domum homewards, domō from home, domī at home. This is why the phrase is Rōmam it and never ad Rōmam it unless the writer means as far as the outskirts.

Prepositions glued to the front of verbs

Latin builds new verbs by fixing a preposition onto an old one, and English inherited nearly all of them. This is the best vocabulary bargain in the language: learn mittō, mittere, mīsī, missum, send, and you have the skeleton of a dozen English words.

The same trick works on pōnō, place: compōnō put together, dēpōnō put down, expōnō set out, impōnō put on, prōpōnō put forward, suppōnō put underneath, giving compose, deposit, expose, impose, propose and suppose. And on dūcō, lead: conduct, deduce, induce, introduce, produce, reduce, seduce.

Two spelling notes so the compounds do not look like new words. The final consonant of a preposition often changes to match what follows: ad plus ferō gives afferō, in plus pōnō gives impōnō, sub plus pōnō gives suppōnō. And the vowel of the verb often weakens: faciō becomes -ficiō in interficiō and perficiō, and capiō becomes -cipiō in accipiō and recipiō. That weakening is why English has both fact and perfect, both captive and recipient.

Roman life: the distances all these prepositions were measuring

The reason Latin has so many words for to, from, through and past is that Romans moved, on a road system nobody in Europe matched again for well over a thousand years.

It starts with one road and one man. In 312 BC the censor Appius Claudius Caecus laid out the Via Appia south from Rome towards Capua, later extended to Brundisium on the heel of Italy. Roman roads were built in layers, drained, and surveyed straight where the ground allowed, and they carried the cursus pūblicus, the state courier service, at speeds a letter would not beat again until the railway.

Distance was marked. A stone was set at every Roman mile, the mīlle passūs or thousand paces, about 1,480 metres, and the stones gave the distance to and from named places, which is where you see prepositions working in the field: a milestone is a sentence about how far somewhere is from somewhere else. In 20 BC Augustus, holding the office of cūrātor viārum, set up in the Forum near the Temple of Saturn a gilded column called the Milliārium Aureum, the Golden Milestone, from which distances on the main roads were reckoned. We do not know what was written on it; proposals run from Augustus's own name and titles to a list of cities with their mileages. Almost nothing of it survives, and the fragments sometimes claimed for it may belong to something else. The phrase all roads lead to Rome is usually traced to that column, and the tracing is an interpretation rather than a Roman statement.

So when Marcus walks ad balnea and back ad vīllam, the grammar he is using is the same grammar that measured an empire. Ad plus accusative on a milestone, ad plus accusative on the way to a bath.

Common misconceptions

• In always takes the ablative. It takes the ablative for position and the accusative for motion. In vīllā est, he is in the house; in vīllam currit, he runs into the house.
• Cum is the Latin for with, so with a sword is cum gladiō. Cum is for company. A tool or means goes in the bare ablative: gladiō pugnat. Roman writers are consistent about this.
• To the girl needs a preposition. It needs the dative: puellae. The dative is how Latin says to or for somebody, and adding ad makes it motion towards a physical target instead.
• He went to Rome is ad Romam it. Town names take the plain accusative: Rōmam it. At Rome is Rōmae, an old locative, and from Rome is Rōmā.
• Admitto and mitto are different words to be learned separately. Ad-mittō is mittō with a preposition on the front, and its principal parts are admittō, admittere, admīsī, admissum, exactly mittō's with the prefix added.

English that came out of this lesson

• ad, to: ad hoc, advent, adjacent, and the advertisement that turns you towards something.
• ante, before: antebellum, antecedent, anterior, and ancient. Not to be confused with Greek anti, against.
• circum, around: circumference, circumstance, circus, circumnavigate.
• contrā, against: contrary, contradict, counter, country, from terra contrāta, the land lying opposite.
• inter, between: interval, international, interrupt, interior, and inter alia.
• per, through: perforate, permanent, persist, per capita, and perfect, thoroughly made.
• post, after: postpone, posterity, post mortem, postscript.
• prō, in front of, for: proceed, promote, pro bono, pronoun.
• sub, under: submarine, subject, suburb, subpoena, and through assimilation support, suppose, suffer.
• trāns, across: transport, translate, transparent, transatlantic.
• sine, without: sinecure, an office without care attached, and sine qua non.
• dē, down from, about: descend, deduce, de facto, and demote.

Where this leaves us

• A Latin preposition governs a case. Most govern the accusative.
• The ablative set is small: ā or ab, cum, dē, ē or ex, prae, prō, sine.
• In and sub take both: accusative for motion into or under, ablative for position in or under.
• Ā and ē before consonants, ab and ex before vowels.
• No preposition for the indirect object (dative), for means (bare ablative), or with names of towns and domus.
• A compound verb is a preposition plus a verb you know, and it keeps that verb's principal parts.

Sources

1. Allen, J. H., and Greenough, J. B. (2014). Uses of prepositions. In M. Ayer (Ed.), Allen and Greenough's New Latin Grammar for Schools and Colleges. Dickinson College Commentaries. dcc.dickinson.edu
2. Allen, J. H., and Greenough, J. B. (2014). The ablative case. In M. Ayer (Ed.), Allen and Greenough's New Latin Grammar. Dickinson College Commentaries. dcc.dickinson.edu
3. Wikipedia contributors. (n.d.). Roman roads. Wikipedia. en.wikipedia.org
4. Wikipedia contributors. (n.d.). Milliarium Aureum. Wikipedia. en.wikipedia.org
5. Wikipedia contributors. (n.d.). Appian Way. Wikipedia. en.wikipedia.org

The year that lasted 445 days

46 BC was 445 days long. That is not a mistake in the record. The Roman republican year ran to 355 days, roughly ten short of the sun, and the gap was made up by inserting an extra month when the pontifex maximus decided one was needed, which meant a priest with political interests decided how long the year was. By the middle of the first century BC the calendar had drifted about three months out of step with the seasons. Caesar, who was himself pontifex maximus, ended it: 46 BC already had one intercalary month in February, and he added sixty-seven more days in two extra months between November and December. Roman writers called it the last year of confusion. His new calendar took effect on 1 January 45 BC, and the astronomer generally credited with designing it is Sosigenes of Alexandria.

Numbers and dates are the part of a language you use every day and never think about, and Latin's are the ancestors of yours. Start in a classroom.

Mārcus numerōs discit

Mārcus numerōs discit. "Ūnus, duo, trēs," inquit, "quattuor, quīnque, sex, septem, octō, novem, decem." Magister rogat: "Quot digitōs habēs?" Mārcus respondet: "Decem digitōs habeō; in manū ūnā quīnque sunt." Deinde magister in tabulā scrībit: XVI. "Quot sunt?" Mārcus cōgitat: "Decem et quīnque et ūnus: sēdecim!" Magister rīdet: "Bene, Mārce. Crās Kalendae Mārtiae sunt, et fēriae."

Marcus is learning his numbers. One, two, three, he says, four, five, six, seven, eight, nine, ten. The teacher asks: how many fingers do you have? Marcus answers: I have ten fingers; on one hand there are five. Then the teacher writes on the tablet: XVI. How many is that? Marcus thinks: ten and five and one, sixteen. The teacher laughs: well done, Marcus. Tomorrow is the Kalends of March, and a holiday.

Glosses: numerus number, discō learn, quot how many, digitus finger, in manū on the hand, tabula writing tablet, cōgitō think, sēdecim sixteen, bene well, crās tomorrow, fēriae holidays.

You can already read the numbers because English took most of them: duo, trēs, sex, septem, novem, decem. What English did not take is the awkward part: three of these words decline.

One to twenty, and the three that decline

Look at 18 and 19. Duodēvīgintī is two-from-twenty and ūndēvīgintī is one-from-twenty. Romans did the same at every ten from twenty up: 28 is duodētrīgintā, 29 is ūndētrīgintā. It is the spoken habit behind the written IIX and XIX, and it is why subtraction turns up in their numerals at all.

Now the three numerals that have case endings. Everything from quattuor to centum is indeclinable, so quattuor puellae and quattuor puellās use the same form. One, two and three do not get off so lightly.

Ūnus is bonus except in the genitive and dative singular, where it borrows ūnīus and ūnī for every gender; a small group of adjectives including tōtus, sōlus and alter does the same. Duo keeps a form older than Latin itself, the dual, which is why it looks unlike anything else. Trēs is simply a third declension adjective of two terminations, exactly like fortis from last lesson, with trium and tribus.

Mīlle, a thousand, is indeclinable in the singular: mīlle passūs, a thousand paces, a Roman mile. But its plural mīlia is a neuter noun in its own right and takes a genitive after it: tria mīlia mīlitum, three thousands of soldiers. English does this too when it says thousands of people.

In short: learn one, two and three properly and you can ignore the endings of everything up to a hundred.

Writing the numerals the way Romans wrote them

Seven letters carry the system: I is 1, V is 5, X is 10, L is 50, C is 100, D is 500, M is 1000. A letter after a larger one adds, so VIII is 8 and CLX is 160.

Now the part usually taught wrongly. You were probably told that four is IV and never IIII, because a smaller letter before a larger one subtracts. Romans used subtraction, but not as a rule, and additive forms are everywhere in their own inscriptions: IIII for 4, XXXX for 40, CCCC for 400, XXIIII for 24, CCCCLXXXX for 490. The numbered entrances of the Colosseum survive, and gate 44 is cut as XLIIII, mixing both systems in one number on one stone. Clock faces still print IIII, and they are following Roman practice rather than breaking it. The tidy rule you learned is medieval and modern housekeeping applied to a looser ancient habit.

Three practical notes. There is no zero and no need for one, because the system is not positional. Large numbers were written with a bar over a numeral to multiply it by a thousand, so a barred X is ten thousand. And a date like MDCCLXXVI reads M plus D plus CC plus L plus XX plus VI, which is 1776, exactly the way you would add coins.

The procedure for a Roman date, worked twice

Roman dates hang off three fixed points in every month.

• Kalendae, the Kalends: the 1st, always.
• Nōnae, the Nones: the 5th, but the 7th in March, May, July and October.
• Īdūs, the Ides: the 13th, but the 15th in those same four months.

The old mnemonic is worth having: in March, July, October, May, the Nones fall on the seventh day. Those four months are the ones that had 31 days in the earliest Roman calendar, which is why they are the odd ones out.

On one of those three days, Latin uses the plain ablative: Kalendīs Iānuāriīs on 1 January, Īdibus Mārtiīs on 15 March, which is the day Caesar was killed in 44 BC. The day before one of them is prīdiē plus the accusative: prīdiē Īdūs Mārtiās, 14 March. Every other day is counted backwards to the next fixed point, using ante diem plus a numeral and the accusative, abbreviated a.d. And here is the step that trips everybody: Romans counted inclusively, so both ends are in the count.

Procedure, first worked example. Convert a.d. III Kal. Ian.

1. Find the fixed point. Kal. Ian. is 1 January.
2. Count backwards inclusively. 1 January is day one. 31 December is day two. 30 December is day three.
3. Answer: 30 December.

Second worked example, and this time the fixed point is inside the month. Convert a.d. IV Nōn. Mār.

1. The Nones of March fall on the 7th, because March is one of the four.
2. Count back inclusively: the 7th is one, the 6th is two, the 5th is three, the 4th is four.
3. Answer: 4 March.

Allen and Greenough give the shortcut as arithmetic: take the date of the fixed point, add one, subtract the numeral. For a.d. IV Nōn. Mār. that is 7 plus 1 minus 4, which is 4. For a.d. III Kal. Ian. you need the length of the previous month instead, so 31 plus 1 minus 3 gives 29 of December, and that is where the shortcut catches you out: counting to the Kalends means counting to the first of the next month, so the formula is 31 plus 2 minus 3, giving 30. When in doubt, count on your fingers inclusively. It takes four seconds and it is never wrong.

The core of it: inclusive counting is the whole difficulty. A Roman third day before is an English two days before.

The months, and the four that are misnamed

September means seventh and falls ninth. October means eighth and falls tenth. The names are a fossil of a calendar that began in March, and they have been wrong for about two and a half thousand years without anybody bothering to fix them. Quintilis and Sextilis, the fifth and sixth, got renamed and so hid the evidence; the other four did not.

Roman life: the eight-day week and the market day

Romans had no seven-day week for most of their history. They had an eight-day cycle marked in the calendar with the letters A to H, and the eighth day was the nundinae, the market day. The name means ninth day, because of the same inclusive counting: if today is a market day you count today as one and the next market day comes out as the ninth.

The nundinae were what a weekend is for. Farmers came into town to sell; auctions were held; schoolchildren got the day off; officials used the crowd to announce coming assemblies and proposed laws, which made the market day part of the political machinery as well as the economy. People had a full bath and a haircut. The wife of Jupiter's priest sacrificed a ram. Patricians were originally barred from doing business on the day, a restriction that faded.

The seven-day week arrived later, from the Near East and the astrological naming of days after the planets, and by the imperial period it had displaced the nundinal cycle. So the Valerius household in this course, set in the first century AD, lives with both: an eight-day market rhythm inherited from the republic and a seven-day week pushing it out. If you have ever wondered why the Romance languages name Saturday after the Sabbath and Sunday after the Lord while Tuesday to Friday still carry Mars, Mercury, Jupiter and Venus, this is where that mixture starts.

Common misconceptions

• Romans always wrote four as IV. They wrote IIII at least as often. The Colosseum's gate 44 is XLIIII. The strict subtractive rule is later tidying, and clock faces preserve the older habit.
• All Latin numbers decline. Only ūnus, duo, trēs, the hundreds from ducentī up, and the plural mīlia. Everything from quattuor to centum is fixed.
• The Ides are always the 15th. Only in March, May, July and October. Everywhere else they are the 13th, and the Nones move with them from the 7th to the 5th.
• a.d. III Kal. Ian. means three days before 1 January, so 29 December. It means 30 December. Roman counting includes the day you start from.
• September has always meant the ninth month. It means the seventh, and it is evidence that the Roman year once started in March. The names were never corrected.

English that came out of this lesson

• ūnus, one: unit, union, unique, unanimous, universe, onion, from a Latin word for a single large pearl.
• duo, two: duo, dual, duel, double, and doubt, from dubitāre, to be of two minds.
• trēs, three: trio, triple, trinity, tripod, and trivial, from trivium, a place where three roads meet, so a thing talked about on any street corner.
• quattuor, four: quarter, quartet, squad, and quarantine, the forty days a ship waited.
• quīnque, five: quintet, quintuplet, quintessence, the fifth essence beyond earth, water, air and fire.
• decem, ten: decimal, decade, dean, from decānus, a man over ten, dime, and decimate, which in Roman use meant executing one man in ten.
• centum, hundred: century, centurion, per cent, centenary, centipede.
• mīlle, thousand: mile, from mīlle passūs, million, millennium, millipede, millimetre.
• Kalendae, the first of the month: calendar, because the kalendārium was the ledger of debts due on that day.
• annus, year: annual, anniversary, biennial, perennial, annuity.
• mēnsis, month: semester, from sex mēnsēs, and menstrual.
• diēs, day: diary, dial, diurnal, meridian, and journal, through French.

Recap

• Cardinals: ūnus, duo, trēs, quattuor, quīnque, sex, septem, octō, novem, decem; 18 and 19 are two-from-twenty and one-from-twenty.
• Only ūnus, duo and trēs decline among the small numbers. Ūnus has ūnīus and ūnī; trēs is a two-termination third declension adjective.
• Mīlle is indeclinable; mīlia is a neuter noun with a genitive after it.
• I V X L C D M, added left to right, with subtraction used but not required; IIII and XXXX are Roman.
• Kalends the 1st; Nones the 5th, or the 7th in March, May, July and October; Ides the 13th, or the 15th in those four.
• Ablative on the day itself, prīdiē plus accusative the day before, ante diem plus numeral and accusative for the rest, counting inclusively.
• September to December mean seventh to tenth, from a year that began in March.

Sources

1. Allen, J. H., and Greenough, J. B. (2014). Numerals. In M. Ayer (Ed.), Allen and Greenough's New Latin Grammar for Schools and Colleges. Dickinson College Commentaries. dcc.dickinson.edu
2. Allen, J. H., and Greenough, J. B. (2014). Reckoning of time. In M. Ayer (Ed.), Allen and Greenough's New Latin Grammar. Dickinson College Commentaries. dcc.dickinson.edu
3. Wikipedia contributors. (n.d.). Julian calendar. Wikipedia. en.wikipedia.org
4. Wikipedia contributors. (n.d.). Roman numerals. Wikipedia. en.wikipedia.org
5. Wikipedia contributors. (n.d.). Nundinae. Wikipedia. en.wikipedia.org