Two ut-Clauses in a Night March
While working through a practice passage set at the end of a third-year course, a student meets this sentence in a night-march narrative:
Tantus terror milites cepit ut portas relinquerent, quamquam dux signum dare non destitit.
Two sentences later the same writer says:
Milites tamen, postquam extra vallum constiterunt, signa reliquerunt ut celerius fugerent.
The student's draft renders both ut-clauses alike - 'so that they left the gates' and 'so that they fled more quickly' - and cannot decide whether the first clause reports a purpose (the men meant to abandon the gates) or a result (the panic caused the abandonment). The teacher insists that the Latin itself settles the question, not the student's sense of what frightened soldiers would do. The student must also explain why the first clause has relinquerent rather than reliquerunt, and why the second clause cannot simply be relabeled a result without rewriting its main clause.
1. Decide whether the first ut-clause expresses purpose or result, and defend the decision using at least three features of the sentence.
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It is a result clause. (1) The main clause contains the correlative tantus; tantus ... ut is the standard frame for a result, and tantus by itself signals degree of effect, not intention. (2) The main verb cepit ('seized') names an emotional state, and an emotion is exactly the kind of cause that produces a consequence rather than a plan; a purpose reading would require a deliberating subject, and terror is not one. (3) The concessive quamquam dux signum dare non destitit ('although the commander did not stop giving the signal') makes the point of the sentence the failure of intention: the men were ordered to hold, yet fear drove them out. That contrast only works if the ut-clause is the outcome. Note also that no purpose clause needs a correlative in the main clause; if a writer wanted purpose here, tantus would have to go.
2. Explain why the clause has *relinquerent* and not *reliquerunt*, and what an indicative would have meant after *ut*.
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The main verb cepit is perfect indicative, which in narrative counts as secondary sequence, so a result clause takes the imperfect subjunctive: relinquerent. The imperfect presents the outcome as contemporaneous with or following the seizure, which is what the sense requires. Reliquerunt is a perfect indicative and cannot stand in a result clause: result clauses take the subjunctive without exception. After ut, an indicative verb is read as a temporal or comparative connective ('when', 'as'), so ut reliquerunt would mean something like 'when they abandoned', not 'so that they abandoned'. If the main verb were primary - for example tantus terror milites capit ut portas relinquant - the present subjunctive would be required.
3. Rewrite the second sentence so that its clause becomes a result statement with as few changes as possible, and explain what you had to add.
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A minimal rewrite is: Milites tamen, postquam extra vallum constiterunt, tam celeriter fugerunt ut signa relinquerent. The ut-clause has been attached to a main clause that contains a degree marker, tam with celeriter, which is what licenses a result reading; the verb of the clause then goes into the imperfect subjunctive on secondary sequence. Simply changing fugerent to fugiebant or relabeling the clause does not work, because the original main clause signa reliquerunt offers no signal of degree or consequence - the ut-clause there answers 'why did they leave the standards?', which is purpose. In short, the difference between the two clauses is not the mood but the frame around it: a correlative in the main clause creates a result, its absence with a verb of motion or command favors purpose.