Latin Language and Literature
This domain tests Latin morphology and syntax, metrical reading, and the literary-historical map of Latin texts from Plautus to late antiquity. Expect parsing, translation, scansion, and questions that pair author with genre, metre and period.
Verb and case system
- Four conjugations plus the mixed third/fourth; learn principal parts, since perfect stems and supines are not predictable from the present.
- Deponents (hortor, sequor, patior) have passive forms with active meaning; their perfect participles are active (hortatus, 'having urged').
- Subjunctive uses: purpose (ut/nē), result (ut/ut nōn), indirect command, indirect question, cum clauses, conditions and fear clauses (nē).
Constructions that decide marks
- Ablative absolute: a noun or pronoun with a participle in the ablative, grammatically independent of the main clause.
- Accusative and infinitive after verbs of saying, thinking and perceiving; reflexives (se, suus) refer to the subject of the governing verb.
- Cum takes the subjunctive when circumstantial, causal or concessive, the indicative when purely temporal.
- Gerundive of obligation (delenda est Carthago); purpose with ad + gerundive or genitive + causa.
Metre
Dactylic hexameter (Lucretius, Virgil, Ovid's Metamorphoses); elegiac couplet, a hexameter followed by a pentameter with fixed caesurae (Catullus, Propertius, Tibullus, Ovid's Amores); Horace's Alcaic and Sapphic stanzas; the iambic senarius of comedy.
Worked example
Urbe captā, cīvēs fūgērunt. Reasoning: urbe is ablative singular of urbs, and captā is the perfect passive participle, ablative feminine singular, agreeing with it. The pair is grammatically detached because the main subject is cīvēs, a different referent, so it is an ablative absolute: 'After the city had been captured, the citizens fled.' In Urbem captam cīvēs fūgērunt, urbem captam is the object of the verb and there is no absolute at all.
Traps
- Calling a phrase absolute when its noun is also the main subject or object.
- Rendering every gerundive as a future passive.
- Swapping nē (purpose, fear) with ut nōn (negative result).
- Reading the pentameter as a truncated hexameter rather than a fixed colon structure.
- Confusing Seneca the Younger (tragedies, Letters) with Seneca the Elder (controversiae).