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.
First decision: genre and register
- Prose: historiography (Caesar, Sallust, Livy, Tacitus), oratory (Cicero), letters (Cicero, Seneca, the younger Pliny), philosophical or didactic treatise, novel.
- Verse: epic and didactic in hexameter; elegy in elegiac couplet; lyric in Horace's Alcaic and Sapphic stanzas; comedy in iambic senarii and trochaic septenarii.
Prose features worth naming
- Caesar's brevitas and parataxis; Sallust's archaisms and inconcinnitas; Livy's periodic sentence; Tacitus' pointed sententiae and variatio.
- Figures, preferably with their Latin names: anaphora, chiasmus, tricolon, asyndeton, polysyndeton, hyperbaton, praeteritio, apostrophe, interrogatio, personificatio, similitudo, metaphora.
- Historic present and historic infinitive as narrative speed devices.
Verse features
- Hexameter: six feet of dactyls (– ∪ ∪) and spondees (– –); the fifth foot is usually a dactyl and the sixth a spondee or trochee; the main caesura normally falls in the third foot.
- Elegiac couplet: a hexameter followed by a pentameter, which is built as two halves with a central diaeresis.
- Watch for elision, synizesis, hyperbaton, alliteration and onomatopoeia.
Worked example
Urbem incensam relinquunt, agros vastant, praedam reponunt.
- Three parallel main clauses with asyndeton form a tricolon: name the figure and then its effect, the impression of rapid, unstoppable succession.
- Historic presents (relinquunt, vastant, reponunt) shift the narrative into the reader's present.
- incensam agrees with urbem as a participial epithet and could be expanded as a relative clause; note how compression creates pathos. A full-mark answer names the device, quotes the Latin, and links it to the author's purpose.
Traps that cost marks
- Retelling the content instead of commenting on the writing.
- Naming a figure without pointing to the exact words that prove it.
- Calling any repetition anaphora: anaphora repeats at the beginning of successive clauses.
- Confusing hexameter with elegiac couplet, or claiming a scansion you cannot support.
- Ignoring the metre when the text is verse; ignoring prose rhythm when it is prose.