Optional Latin Challenge: Aeneid, Book 2, lines 550-558

Here's your chance to translate a few lines of the Aeneid on your own. This is not required! Some necessary grammar and notes appear below, but I'll leave you to look up the vocabulary (use the glossary in your Virgil book, and a few of my notes that appear at the end of this post). If you have a problem that I haven't addressed in the notes, e-mail me or leave a comment. Remember that the Romans are very big on hyperbaton (separating adjectives and nouns, for instance, so you have to "walk over" words to reunite the ones that belong together). Bonam fortunam! (this phrase is an exclamatory accusative, by the way!) We'll go over this passage in class.

Book 2, lines 550-58: the scene where Pyrrhus kills Priam.

GRAMMAR: There are two grammatical elements you have to recognize to read this Latin: (1) the perfect tense of the verb (a snap!) and present active participles (equally a snap!)

(1) The perfect tense of the verb is formed from the third principal part.

Amavi (I loved, I have loved) Monui (I warned, I have warned) Duxi (I led, I have led), etc.

To conjugate, you add perfect endings. The form you see repeatedly in these lines is the third person singular, the ending "t." It looks like this:

amavit (he, she, it loved, has loved) duxit (he, she, it led, has led), etc.

(2) The present active participle is translated with an "-ing" ending. It is a verbal adjective that will agree with the noun it modifies in gender, number, and case.

Here are some examples of English participles: praising, loving, leading.

The woman praising the football player loved sports.

The man singing the song is a tenor.

I saw the dog barking.

To form the Latin present active participle, you take the present stem (the second principal part minus -re) and add 3rd declension endings. A few endings, however, differ slightly from the 3rd declension nouns you have learned, and I will indicate these with an asterix.

SING. M&F
nom. laudans (-ns)
gen. laudantis (-ntis)
dat. laudanti (-nti)
acc. laundantem (-ntem)
abl. laudanti (-nti) * (sometimes -nte)

PLURAL
nom. laudantes (-ntes)
gen. laudantium (-ntium)*
dat. laudantibus (-ntibus)
acc. laudantes (-ntes)
abl. laudantibus (-ntibus)

THE NEUTER 3RD-DECLENSION ADJECTIVES ARE EXACTLY THE SAME EXCEPT FOR THE ACC. SING.. AND PLURAL NOM. & ACC. FORMS:

Neuter nom. sing. and acc. singular: laudans (the nom. & acc. are the same)

Neuter nom. pl. and acc. pl.: laudantia (-ntia)*

NOTES

V. 550: "Die!" (imperative of a deponent verb, which we haven't learned yet, and the end of a quote from Pyrrhus)

v. 551 dicens and trementem are both present active participles

v. 552 lapsantem is a pres. active participle

V. 553 laeva and dextra refer to the left hand and right hand respectively.

v. 554 extulit comes from effero, an irregular verb.

555 tulit comes from fero; videntem is a present active participle