Prescribed prose text: comprehension and translation
What this domain tests
The prescribed prose section tests close knowledge of your set author's Latin and the historical or rhetorical context. You may be asked to translate a short passage and to answer comprehension questions on character, argument and style.
Core rules
- Know the Latin, not just the English summary. Learn short quotations for key moments.
- Identify the author's rhetorical armoury: tricolon, antithesis, praeteritio, rhetorical question, apostrophe, historical present, speeches.
- Place the extract: speaker, addressee, immediate context, and what happens next.
- For comprehension answers, use evidence from the Latin and explain effect, not just paraphrase.
- Translate set passages with the same clause analysis as unseen prose: main verb, subordination, pronouns.
Worked example
Quibus rebus cognitis, senatus, ne res publica in periculum veniret, consules cum exercitu proficisci iussit.
- Quibus rebus cognitis = ablative absolute, 'when these things had been learned'.
- ne ... veniret = negative purpose clause: 'so that the state should not come into danger'.
- iussit + proficisci = indirect command with a deponent infinitive: 'ordered the consuls to set out'. Translation: 'When these things had been learned, the senate, so that the state should not come into danger, ordered the consuls to set out with the army.'
Traps
Writing a comprehension answer from memory of the English instead of the Latin; treating ne as 'lest' when it is simple negative purpose; missing the force of a speech's rhetoric; ignoring the difference between se (the subject) and eum (someone else).