PAU Latin II (Madrid) key terms

Latin construction made of a noun or pronoun in the ablative plus a participle or adjective agreeing with it, forming a clause separate from the main sentence; Spanish usually renders it with a subordinate clause or a gerund.

Indirect statement in which a verb of saying, thinking or perceiving governs an infinitive whose subject stands in the accusative; Spanish normally turns it into a que-clause.

Verbal mood expressing non-factual meaning: purpose, result, wish, command, hypothesis or reported thought; recognising its triggers is essential for accurate translation of subordinate clauses.

Rules governing which tense of the subjunctive follows a main verb, depending on whether that verb is primary (present, future, perfect with present sense) or historic (imperfect, pluperfect, historic perfect).

A participle agreeing with a noun or pronoun of the main clause and forming a subordinate clause with it; Spanish often expands it into a relative or temporal clause.

Verbal adjective with tense and voice: present active, perfect passive, future active and future passive (gerundive); its correct identification determines voice and time in translation.

Verbal noun declining in the oblique cases of the singular (genitive, dative, accusative, ablative) and expressing the idea of the verb as an activity; Spanish renders it with an infinitive or gerund.

Future passive participle expressing obligation or necessity, as in delenda est Carthago; it also agrees with nouns to convey duty, as in libertas defendenda.

Non-finite verb form with tense and voice but no person; it appears in indirect statement, as complement of modal verbs and in nominal functions, and its tense is relative to the main verb.

Subordinating conjunctions introducing purpose, result, command and substantive clauses; ut is positive and ne negative, and the mood is subjunctive in all these uses.

Use of cum with the imperfect or pluperfect subjunctive to mean when or after; the subjunctive marks the clause as background narrative rather than a precise time relation.

Invariable word joining words or clauses (et, sed, autem, igitur, quod, quamquam); identifying whether it coordinates or subordinates is a first step in parsing a long period.

Grammatical case of a noun, pronoun or adjective (nominative, vocative, accusative, genitive, dative, ablative); endings alone are ambiguous, so syntax and agreement must decide the function.

The Roman state conceived as the common affair of its citizens; in texts it can mean the republican constitution specifically, as opposed to rule by one man.

Military and civil power held by a magistrate, granted by law and limited in time and scope; the term also names the territory under Roman rule.

Legal power attached to a magistracy or to the head of a household, distinct from imperium in that it carries no military command; tribunes of the plebs held it as their defining authority.

Formal advice issued by the Senate to magistrates; it was not law in itself but normally guided action, and in emergencies it could authorise the consuls to defend the state.

One of two annually elected chief magistrates who commanded armies, presided over the Senate and gave their names to the year; the office marked the summit of the cursus honorum.

Plebeian magistrate elected to protect citizens against patrician magistrates, with the power to veto and personal inviolability; the office became a platform for popular politics in the late Republic.

The sequence of public offices a Roman aristocrat normally held, from quaestor through aedile or tribune, praetor and consul; it structured political careers and appears in inscriptions and biographies.

The council of former magistrates that advised the consuls, controlled finance and foreign policy, and supplied the political elite whose debates Latin prose authors often report.

The body of law applying to Roman citizens, developed by jurists and magistrates and later codified; its categories and vocabulary underlie much modern civil law.

The legal authority of a Roman father over his legitimate children and their descendants, including property and, in early law, life and death; it ended only with emancipation or his death.

The legal act by which an owner freed a slave, granting citizenship in the formal forms; freedmen kept obligations to their former master, which shaped Roman social structure.

Roman cultural ideal combining literary education, refined conduct and humane treatment of others; Cicero uses it to link Greek learning with Roman civic responsibility.

Manly excellence understood as courage, self-control and service to the state; in historiography it is the quality by which generals and statesmen are judged.

A memorable deed or saying used to illustrate a moral point; Roman historians and orators collected such cases to teach conduct and to persuade audiences.

The writing of history, a prose genre in which Roman authors combined annalistic record, moral judgement and rhetorical speeches; its conventions differ from modern historical method.

Year-by-year records of events kept by priests and later the model for Roman narrative history; the word also labels the genre of senatorial history written in that form.

The art of persuasive speech, central to Roman education and public life; its parts, styles and figures are presupposed in speeches, letters and historical writing.

A formal speech, also the style of speaking proper to an orator; in indirect discourse the word denotes reported speech, so context decides the sense.

A song or poem, especially one in verse; in early Latin it can also mean a ritual formula or charm, so the context of the passage determines which sense applies.

A line of verse; the term also means a row or furrow and appears in the phrase versus ad, meaning towards, whose meaning must be distinguished from the poetic sense.

The quantitative pattern of long and short syllables that structures Latin verse; hexameter, elegiac couplet and lyric metres are the main systems a candidate must scan.

Vergil's twelve-book epic on Aeneas' journey from Troy to Italy, linking Roman origins to Homeric epic and to Augustan ideology; a standard text for literary commentary.

Author of the Eclogues, Georgics and Aeneid, writing under Augustus; his works became school texts and shaped later European epic and pastoral poetry.

Orator, politician and philosophical writer of the late Republic; his speeches, letters and treatises supply both the model of periodic prose and much evidence for Roman politics.

Historian of the late Republic whose monographs on Catiline and Jugurtha use archaising prose and moralising digressions; a frequent author in translation examinations.

Author of Ab urbe condita, a history of Rome in 142 books from its founding; only part survives, and its narrative style and speeches are widely studied.