5.1 Sententiae: Wisdom in One Line — Epoché
What you will be able to do Read twenty-four complete Latin sentences without help. Work out what each word is doing from its ending rather than its position. Recognise a sentence with no verb in it, which Latin permits and English does not. Recognise an infinitive or an adjective standing where English would need a noun. Prerequisites : lesson 4.6 — the function words, and with them the whole of the first phase's vocabulary. This is the first real Latin in the course. Everything up to here has been chosen, arranged and explained; from this page on you are reading sentences that were written to be read rather than to be studied. They are short — that is the concession, and it is the only one. A one-line maxim is a complete sentence with a complete grammar, and twenty-four of them will exercise more of what you have learned than a paragraph of narrative would, because each one starts again. Several of them you will already know in English. The text is in a separate document beside this one. Read it there first, all twenty-four, without looking anything up. Then come back. About this text Twenty-four sentences, each one a complete thought, each one quoted from the corpus and each one older than the corpus by a long way. They are sententiae — the word from 4.5 that means an opinion and then a maxim worth repeating — and they are the form in which Latin has survived best: a language can lose its speakers and keep its proverbs. Where they come from. Several are from named authors and the notes say which: Horace, Virgil, Juvenal, Caesar, Seneca, Vegetius, Descartes. Others are anonymous, or are Latin translations of Greek that had been anonymous for centuries before that. Two are from the Vulgate. The attributions in the notes are the traditional ones; several are disputed by scholars and none of them matter for reading the Latin. Why they are hard. A maxim is compressed on purpose. Words that can be left out are left out, the copula disappears whenever the sense will carry it, and the word order is arranged for memorability rather than for clarity. Four of the twenty-four have no verb at all. This is not a simplified text with the hard parts removed; it is a dense text that happens to be short. Word by word Each line with a note on what is happening in it. Read the line first, then the note. The notes name the grammar by the lesson it came from, so that you can go back to anything that has gone. # Latin What is happening 1 Tempus fugit. [1] Subject and verb, and nothing else. The Latin is two words and the English is two words, which will not happen again. 2 Fiat lux! [2] A subjunctive: let there be . The opening of Genesis in the Vulgate, and the motto of a dozen universities. 3 Homo sum. [3] No pronoun. The person is in the verb ending, as 2.1 said, and putting one in would be emphatic. 4 Vita brevis est. [4] Adjective, noun, verb — the copula last, which is the ordinary Latin order and the reverse of English. 5 Carpe diem. [5] An imperative with its object. Horace, and the second half of the line is in the references. 6 Festina lente. [6] Imperative plus adverb. Attributed to Augustus, who is said to have used it constantly. 7 Alea iacta est. [7] A perfect passive: has been thrown . Caesar at the Rubicon, quoting a Greek proverb. 8 Nosce te ipsum. [8] Imperative, then an accusative pronoun, then an intensifier agreeing with it. Originally Greek, carved at Delphi. 9 Veni, vidi, vici. [9] Three perfects, all first person singular, all four letters longer than their stems. The most quoted sentence in Latin. 10 Cogito, ergo sum. [10] Two verbs and a connective. Descartes wrote it in French first and in Latin second. 11 Errare humanum est. [11] An infinitive used as a noun and standing as the subject: to err is a human thing . The neuter adjective does the work of an English noun. 12 Amor vincit omnia. [12] Subject, verb, object — the order English would use, which is why this one is deceptively easy. Virgil wrote it the other way round. 13 Divide et impera! [13] Two imperatives joined. Attributed to Philip of Macedon and to everybody since. 14 Scientia potentia est. [14] Two nominatives and the copula. The predicate noun is in the nominative, as 3.2 said. 15 In vino veritas. [15] A preposition with the ablative, and no verb at all. Latin can leave out the copula whenever the sense is clear. 16 Panem et circenses. [16] Two accusatives and no verb: what the Roman crowd wanted, according to Juvenal, who was complaining. 17 Memento mori. [17] An imperative with an infinitive. The second word is a deponent, as 4.5 explained. 18 Qui tacet, consentit. [18] A relative clause as the subject: he who is silent . The first word is the relative pronoun, not a question. 19 Ars longa, vita brevis. [19] Four words, two clauses, no verb in either. Hippocrates in Latin translation, and the original meant the art of medicine. 20 Fortes fortuna adiuvat. [20] A plural adjective used as a noun — the brave — and it is the object, not the subject. The ending tells you. 21 Mens sana in corpore sano. [21] A prepositional phrase with no verb. From Juvenal, and half of a longer sentence that asks for both. 22 Non scholae, sed vitae discimus. [22] Two datives of purpose and one verb. Seneca said the opposite and complained about it. 23 Si vis pacem, para bellum. [23] A conditional with an imperative. Vegetius, and the commonest Latin sentence in modern political writing. 24 Verba volant, scripta manent. [24] Two clauses, each subject and verb, with nothing joining them. The asyndeton is the point. The frame of the sentence Every one of these is a complete sentence, and the whole skill of reading Latin is finding the frame: what is the verb, what is its subject, and what else is hanging off it. In a language with free word order, the frame is carried by the endings and nothing else. Find the verb first. It is usually last, but not always — the third, ninth and twelfth lines put it elsewhere. What identifies it is its endin