PAU Latin II (Madrid) study guide

PAU Latin II (Madrid) · Work through your exam, one topic at a time.

The PAU Latin II examination in the Community of Madrid is one of the subject-specific papers in the university entrance assessment taken by students who have chosen Latin in the humanities or social-science track, and by candidates improving their admission score. It assesses whether you can read a Latin text with real comprehension and then talk about it with technical precision: translating a prose passage into Spanish, identifying and explaining the morphology and syntax of forms in that passage, glossing vocabulary and expressions in context, commenting on literary features of a text, and placing authors, genres and works in their periods. The PAU Latin II (Madrid) study guide has 6 sections and about 2,839 words.

Translation of a Latin prose text into Spanish

This domain covers the versión : a short passage of Latin prose - historiographical, oratorical or epistolary, usually 50–80 words - that you must render into idiomatic Spanish. It carries roughly half the paper's marks, so a controlled method and natural Spanish decide the grade far more than a lucky guess at one word.

506 words, about 3 min 02

Morphosyntactic commentary on the translated text

Here the examiner takes four or five words or short expressions from the passage and asks for their full morphosyntactic analysis: what the form is and what it is doing in the sentence. Marks are split between identification and function, so a flawless parse with no syntactic label earns only half.

478 words, about 2 min 03

Lexicon and semantics: meaning of words and expressions in context

This domain tests meaning in use, not the dictionary list: the paper asks for the Spanish equivalent of a few words or expressions as they appear in the passage, and often for Spanish derivatives or for the sense of a Latin phrase still current in law, science or everyday speech. Latin is heavily polysemous; give the single equivalent that fits the sentence.

454 words, about 2 min 04

Literary analysis and commentary of a Latin text (prose or verse)

This question asks you to comment on the passage you have just translated - genre, structure, tone, rhetorical figures, metre - in a short written answer. What earns marks is analysis anchored in the Latin words, not a summary of what happens.

432 words, about 2 min 05

Latin literature: authors, genres, works and periods

The literature question asks you to place the translated text, or a named author and work, in its genre and period, and to supply identification details: works, dates, characteristics, models. It is a short written recall question, and precision - a title, a century, a genre label - earns the marks.

451 words, about 2 min 06

Latin legacy: institutions, law, art and culture in the Western tradition

This domain covers the Roman world behind the text: magistracies, assemblies, law, architecture and the survivals the paper asks about in a short question - the cursus honorum , the sources of Roman law, architectural orders, the calendar, or a modern institution traced back to Rome. Cursus honorum : quaestor → aedile (or tribune) → praetor → consul; censorship and dictatorship stood outside the ladder.

518 words, about 3 min