SLLC Preliminary flashcards
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- Ablative absolute
- A construction of noun or pronoun plus participle or adjective in the ablative, grammatically independent of the main clause; translated 'when, after, since, although' or 'with ... having been'.
- Sequence of tenses
- Rule governing subjunctive tense in subordinate clauses: primary main verbs take present or perfect subjunctive, secondary main verbs take imperfect or pluperfect.
- Passive periphrastic
- Gerundive plus a form of esse, expressing necessity or obligation, as in Carthago delenda est, 'Carthage must be destroyed'.
- Indirect statement
- Reported speech using accusative subject plus infinitive; the infinitive's tense shows whether the original statement was present, past, or future.
- Deponent verbs
- Verbs passive in form but active in meaning, such as loquor, sequor, and vereor; some, like utor and potior, govern the ablative.
- Principal parts
- The four forms of a Latin verb: present, infinitive, perfect, and perfect passive participle; they supply the stems for all tenses and voices.
- Gratias agere
- Idiom meaning 'to give thanks' or 'to thank'; gratias is accusative object and agere supplies the verb, with the person thanked in the dative.
- Poenas dare
- Idiom meaning 'to pay the penalty' or 'be punished'; poenas is accusative plural and the verb dare is used idiomatically, not literally.
- Place where and place to
- Place-where takes in plus ablative; place-to takes ad or in plus accusative; town names use bare locative or accusative without a preposition.
- Verbs of remembering
- Memini, obliviscor, and admoneo take the genitive of the thing remembered or forgotten, as in memini praeteritorum, 'I remember the past'.
- Duration of time
- Length of time is expressed by the accusative, as in decem annos regnavit, 'he ruled for ten years'; time-when uses the ablative.
- Gerundive of purpose
- Ad plus gerundive or gerund expresses purpose, as in ad urbem capiendam, 'for the purpose of capturing the city'.
- Imperfect versus perfect
- Imperfect portrays ongoing or repeated past action ('was doing, used to do'); perfect reports a completed act ('did, has done'). Keep the contrast in translation.
- Indirect question
- A question reported with a question word and subjunctive verb, rendered in English as a statement: rogavit cur venisset, 'he asked why he had come'.
- Relative clause translation
- The relative pronoun agrees with its antecedent in gender and number but takes case from its own clause; translate by repeating or replacing the antecedent.
- Supplying omitted subject
- Latin verb endings encode person and number, so a subject pronoun is often absent; English requires an explicit subject such as 'he', 'she', or 'they'.
- Choosing object case
- Transitive verbs take accusative objects; verbs of giving, showing, and telling take dative; utor, fruor, and potior take ablative.
- Agent with passive
- Personal agent is expressed by a or ab plus ablative; means or instrument uses the bare ablative with no preposition.
- Purpose clause in Latin
- Positive purpose uses ut plus subjunctive; negative purpose uses ne plus subjunctive; English 'in order to' or 'so that' signals the construction.
- Yes/no question particle
- The enclitic -ne attached to the first word marks a yes/no question, as in videsne, 'do you see?'; question words mark the other type.
- Adjective agreement
- Adjectives match their nouns in gender, number, and case but not necessarily declension; a first/second declension adjective may modify a third declension noun.
- Founding of the Republic
- Traditional date 509 BC, when the last king Tarquinius Superbus was expelled and two annually elected consuls replaced the monarchy.
- Cursus honorum
- The ladder of Roman magistracies: quaestor, aedile or tribune, praetor, then consul; minimum ages and intervals between offices were regulated.
- Second Punic War
- 218 to 201 BC; Hannibal crossed the Alps, won at Cannae in 216, and was finally defeated by Scipio at Zama in 202 BC.
- Ides of March
- 15 March 44 BC, the date of Julius Caesar's assassination by a conspiracy of senators led by Brutus and Cassius.
- Augustan settlement
- Arrangement from 27 BC in which Augustus held tribunician power and superior imperium while claiming to restore the Republic; the principate began.
- Aeneid
- Vergil's twelve-book epic in dactylic hexameter tracing Aeneas from Troy to Italy and grounding Rome's destiny in Trojan ancestry.
- Caesar's Commentarii
- Firsthand campaign narratives, Bellum Gallicum and Bellum Civile, written in third person in plain, direct prose.
- Livy's Ab Urbe Condita
- A 142-book history of Rome from its founding; 35 books survive, prized for narrative vividness rather than strict accuracy.
- Tacitus
- Silver Age historian whose Annals and Histories analyze imperial power; also wrote Agricola, Germania, and the Dialogus.
- Plautus and Terence
- Roman comic playwrights: Plautus wrote farcical, musical comedy such as Miles Gloriosus; Terence wrote more restrained, humane plays such as Adelphoe.
- Dactylic hexameter
- The epic meter of six feet, each a dactyl or spondee, used by Vergil, Lucretius, and Lucan; the fifth foot is usually a dactyl.