Translating Vice and Virtue: Verres, Cleomenes, Scaevola and Cloelia

Set text is not unseen

You have met unseen translation already. This is not that, and treating it the same way costs marks. **On an unseen passage** you are decoding. You have never seen the words in this order, and a sensible near-miss on a hard phrase still earns something. **On a set text** the examiner knows you have had months with these lines. The task is no longer decoding, it is **accuracy**: producing exactly what the Latin says, not a version you half remember from a lesson in October. That is the single commonest failure on this component. A candidate recognises the passage, writes down the gist of the story, and quietly stops matching the actual words on the page. The gist earns very little.

Two authors, two problems

This cycle sets Cicero and Livy. They are difficult in completely different ways, so prepare for each differently.

Where do you start on a long sentence?

A Ciceronian sentence runs for four lines with several subordinate clauses. What do you do first?

• Find the main verb, then find its subject, then fit the subordinate clauses around that skeleton
• Translate word by word from the beginning
• Write the gist from memory, since you know the passage
• Skip it and come back at the end

The constructions that keep coming back

Prose literature at this level reuses the same handful of constructions. Learn to spot them and most of the text becomes routine.

Match each construction to how you render it

Translate the Scaevola passage

Practice Latin, built from words you have already met: **Mucius, iuvenis Romanus, patriae auxilium ferre volebat. deinde de muro descendit et ad exercitum Porsennae venit. milites eum non senserunt. sed subito comes quidam iuvenem invenit et statim ad Porsennam portavit.** Now complete the English. Mucius, a Roman _____, wanted to bring _____ to his homeland. Then he went down from the _____ and came to Porsenna's _____. The soldiers did not _____ him. But suddenly a certain companion found the young man and at once carried him to Porsenna.

The deponent trap

Livy is full of deponent verbs. Select the TWO correct translations.

• **locutus est** means "he spoke"
• **hortata est** means "she encouraged"
• **passus est** means "he was suffered by someone"
• **secutus est** means "he was followed"

This is practice Latin, not the set text

Read this before you go further, because it changes how you should use this module. **The Latin in these exercises is not Cicero and it is not Livy.** It was written for this module, from vocabulary you have already met, to tell the same stories. It gives you the constructions and the method. It does not give you the words that will be on your paper. **The set text rotates every two years, and yours is printed in your own edition.** There is no substitute for working through those actual lines, because on a set-text paper the marks are for matching THOSE words. Use this module for the method and the constructions. Then go and translate your own text, sentence by sentence, and check each one against a translation you trust.

Find the main verb

An English version of a long Ciceronian period, laid out the way the Latin is built. Tap the TWO parts that form the main clause: its subject and its main verb.

• Although the fleet had been provided at great expense by the cities of Sicily, and although its command had been given to a man who was neither Roman nor a soldier,
• Verres
• , with no thought for the province he had been sent to protect,
• took the money for himself
• while the ships lay empty in the harbour.

Render the ablative absolute

The Latin has an ablative absolute meaning literally "with the young man having been found". Build the English a marker wants.

Cloelia, translated

**Practice Latin: mox Cloelia comites suas hortata est. "sequimini me," inquit. deinde trans Tiberim ad urbem suam venerunt. Porsenna hoc sensit et primum iratus erat, sed tandem Cloeliae favebat, quod eam validam esse cogitabat.** "Soon Cloelia encouraged her companions. 'Follow me,' she said. Then they came across the Tiber to their own city. Porsenna noticed this and at first was angry, but finally he favoured Cloelia, because he thought that she was strong." **Four things that version gets right, and each is a place marks are lost.** - **hortata est** is deponent: "encouraged", not "was encouraged" - **sequimini** is a deponent imperative: "follow", addressed to more than one person - **favebat** takes the dative, so Cloeliae is the person favoured, not the person favouring - **eam validam esse** is indirect statement: "that she was strong", with "that" supplied Every one of those is a form, not a guess. **That is what set-text accuracy means**: you are not deciding what the sentence probably says, you are reading what it does say.

The order to work in

Put the steps for translating a set-text sentence into the order that produces an accurate version.

• Find the main verb, and note its person, number and tense
• Find its subject, checking the ending agrees with the verb
• Identify each subordinate clause and what introduces it
• Work out what each participle and ablative absolute is doing, and when it happened relative to the main verb
• Write the English out fully, then read it back against the Latin word group by word group

Accurate or fluent?

Your first version reads awkwardly in English but every Latin word is accounted for. What should you do?

• Tidy it into natural English while checking that nothing has quietly dropped out, since a translation must be accurate AND readable
• Leave it awkward, because accuracy is all that counts
• Rewrite it freely so it reads well, even if a word or two goes
• Replace it with the version you memorised in class

The set text in the exam

The paper is in front of you and the passage is one you have studied. Work through it.

• You recognise the passage immediately and could write the story from memory. What do you actually do?
• One word is not one you recognise, though you know the sentence overall. What is the best move?
• You have five minutes left after finishing. What is the best use of them?

Your turn: translate and check

Take one sentence from your own printed set text and work it through the method, writing down what you did at each stage.

• Quote the Latin sentence you chose, and name its main verb and subject
• Identify every participle, ablative absolute or indirect statement in it, and say what each one is doing
• Give your English translation in full
• Name one decision in your version that came from a FORM rather than from knowing the story, and explain how the ending told you