Prescribed verse text: comprehension and translation
What this domain tests
The prescribed verse section tests detailed knowledge of your set poem or poems, usually epic or lyric, including scansion, poetic technique, characterisation and Roman values. Comprehension questions often ask how a speech or simile works, not merely what happens.
Core rules
- Learn key lines by heart with their scansion and translate them precisely.
- Track epic conventions: similes, epithets, prophecy, ecphrasis, divine intervention, repeated formulae.
- Link style to meaning: harsh sounds for battle, spondees for gravity, enjambment for momentum, apostrophe for emotional involvement.
- Know the values in play: pietas, furor, fama, virtus, clementia, imperium.
- For comprehension, quote the Latin phrase and explain its effect.
Worked example
Multa quoque et bello passus, dum conderet urbem
- passus = perfect participle of patior, a deponent: 'having suffered'.
- dum conderet = temporal dum + imperfect subjunctive: 'until he should found'.
- multa ... passus is hyperbaton: multa is delayed and emphasised. Translation: 'and having suffered many things in war too, until he should found the city'.
Traps
Reading the verse as prose and losing the delayed participle; mistaking passus for a passive ('having been suffered'); ignoring the difference between dum + present indicative ('while') and dum + subjunctive ('until'); answering on plot when the question asks about style.