SLLC Preliminary cheat sheet

Six cases: nominative (subject, predicate nominative), genitive (possession, partitive, value), dative (indirect object, agent with passive periphrastic), accusative (direct object, place-to, duration), ablative (means, manner, separation, absolute), vocative (address).

Five declensions identified by genitive singular ending: -ae, -ī, -is, -ūs, -eī; the stem is found by dropping that ending.

Four conjugations by present infinitive: -āre, -ēre, -ere, -īre; the third conjugation -ere has a short e, the second -ēre a long one.

Passive personal endings: -r, -ris, -tur, -mur, -minī, -ntur; perfect passive = PPP + present of esse; future perfect active = perfect stem + -erō/-eris/-erit.

Purpose clauses take ut/ut nē + subjunctive; result clauses take ut/nē + subjunctive and are signalled by tam, ita, tantus, or adeō in the main clause.

Indirect statement uses accusative + infinitive; sequence of tenses governs: primary main verb takes present or perfect infinitive, secondary takes imperfect or pluperfect.

Ablative absolute = noun/pronoun + participle or adjective in the ablative, grammatically independent of the main clause; translate with 'when/after/since/although' or 'with ... having been'.

Conditionals: simple (indicative), future more vivid (future indicative), present contrary-to-fact (imperfect subjunctive), past contrary-to-fact (pluperfect subjunctive).

Golden Age prose: Caesar's Commentarii (Bellum Gallicum, Bellum Civile) in third-person narrative; Cicero's orations (In Catilinam, Pro Archia) and philosophical works (De Officiis).

Golden Age poetry: Vergil's Aeneid (epic, 12 books), Eclogues, Georgics; Horace's Odes and Satires; Ovid's Metamorphoses and Ars Amatoria; elegy in Propertius and Tibullus.

Livy's Ab Urbe Condita covers Rome from its founding in 142 books, of which 35 survive; Sallust writes Bellum Catilinae and Bellum Iugurthinum in a terse, archaizing style.

Silver Age authors: Seneca (tragedies, Epistulae Morales), Lucan (Pharsalia), Statius (Thebaid), Martial (epigrams), Juvenal (satires), Tacitus (Annals, Histories, Agricola, Germania), Pliny the Younger (Epistulae, Panegyricus).

Comedy: Plautus (e.g., Miles Gloriosus, Aulularia) with lively song and farce; Terence (Andria, Adelphoe) with more restrained, humane characterization.

Meters: dactylic hexameter for epic (Vergil, Lucan); elegiac couplet for elegy and epigram (Ovid, Martial); hendecasyllables in Catullus; lyric meters in Horace's Odes.

Rhetorical and epistolary prose: Cicero's De Oratore and Brutus; Pliny's letters as models of the genre; Apuleius' Metamorphoses (The Golden Ass) is a later prose narrative.

Key literary devices to identify: simile, ekphrasis, apostrophe, hyperbaton, chiasmus, anaphora, and the epic conventions arma virumque and the invocation of the Muse.