Translating the Aeneid: Juno’s Storm

A long passage is not many short ones

Your set text for this component is a storm. Juno has not forgiven the Trojans, so she persuades Aeolus, king of the winds, to let them loose on Aeneas’s fleet as it sails from Sicily towards Italy, and the ships are very nearly destroyed. That is what the passage is about, and you can read it in any translation. What this module is about is how you get through a hundred lines of it in Latin without losing your footing. You have already learned how to construe a single verse line, matching each adjective to the noun it belongs to when metre has scattered them. That skill is necessary here and it is not sufficient, because a long narrative asks something else of you. The subject keeps changing. It is Juno, then Aeolus, then the winds, then the ships, and often the poet tells you a great deal before he tells you the verb. Losing track of who is acting is what turns a passage you understand into a translation that does not make sense, and it is the single commonest way marks go missing on this paper.

Latin written for this module

Before anything else, read this. Every line of Latin in this module was written for practice. None of it is from the Aeneid, none of it is by Virgil, and none of it is your set text. That is a deliberate choice rather than a shortcut. Your paper is closed-book, which means you are learning the actual words of the actual passage, and meeting an approximation of them here would be worse than useless: you would learn the approximation, and you would carry it into the exam. Your prescribed lines live in your own printed edition and that is the only place you should meet them. What you get here instead is the method, drilled on Latin you have never seen and built only from the vocabulary lists your specification prescribes, so that when you go back to the real thing you already know what to do with a sentence that will not sit still.

Words for keeping track

Five terms. They are not new to you, but the method below depends on using them precisely rather than loosely.

Match the practice sentence

Who is doing it now

Read this practice sentence: regina nuntium ad villam mittit, sed nuntius non advenit. Who does not arrive?

• The messenger, because nuntius is nominative in the second half and has become the new subject
• The queen, since she is the subject of the sentence
• Both of them, since the sentence has one verb for each
• It cannot be told without more context

One line, then a hundred

The skill you already have and the skill this passage needs are not the same skill, and knowing the difference is what stops the second feeling impossible.

Which two warn you of a change

Select the TWO things that should make you stop and check whether the subject has changed.

• A new noun in the nominative case
• A verb whose person or number does not match the subject you were holding
• A noun in the accusative case
• A line ending

The thread in a sentence

To follow a long passage, first find the _____ verb, which Latin often delays until late in the sentence. Then find its subject, which will be in the _____ case. Hold that subject in mind and keep reading, because a new noun in that same case is your warning that the _____ has passed to somebody else. A noun in the _____ case is being acted on, so it confirms rather than replaces what you have. And remember that in verse a sentence often runs straight through a _____ ending, which therefore tells you nothing at all about the grammar.

Where the subject changes

Four practice sentences. Select the ONE in which the person acting changes partway through.

• regina irata nautas terret et superat
• servi dominum vocant; ille non audit
• nautae in silvam currunt et clamant
• puer parvus periculum conspicit et fugit

Reading a longer stretch

Here is a practice sentence long enough to get lost in, worked through the way you should work through your set text. dum nautae navigant, deus saevus aquam magnam mittit et nautas superat. Start by finding the main verb rather than reading left to right. The sentence opens with dum, which introduces a subordinate clause, so navigant belongs to that clause and is not what the sentence is built on. Set it aside once you have understood it: while the sailors are sailing. Now look for the main verb, and there are two, mittit and superat, joined by et. Their subject is deus saevus, nominative singular, the cruel god. So the cruel god sends and overcomes. Send what? aquam magnam, accusative, a great quantity of water. Overcome whom? nautas, accusative plural, the sailors. Put it together and you have: while the sailors sail, the cruel god sends a great flood of water and overcomes the sailors. Notice three things about how that went. The subordinate clause was dealt with and parked before the main sentence was touched. The subject was established once and then held for both verbs. And every question was asked of the case endings rather than of the word order, which is the only way this works.

Work through it in order

Put the steps for translating a long Latin sentence into the order that keeps you from losing the thread.

• Read to the end of the sentence before translating any of it
• Deal with any subordinate clause and set it aside
• Find the main verb, which may be a long way from the start
• Find its subject in the nominative and hold on to it
• Ask what the verb is done to, and look for an accusative
• Check whether a new nominative appears later and hands the action on

Turn it into English

Translate the practice sentence: nautae in silvam currunt; deinde murum defendunt.

A storm in the exam room

You are translating a long stretch of the set text under timed conditions. Take the decisions in order.

• The sentence runs over three lines and you do not yet see a verb. What do you do?
• You find two verbs. One sits in a clause opened by dum. Which is the main verb?
• Two lines later a new noun appears in the nominative. What does that tell you?
• Your English reads oddly but you are running out of time. What is worth doing?

Explain how you keep the thread

A friend can translate a single line of verse but gets lost halfway through a long passage. Explain the method you would use, in English.

• Explain why reading to the end of the sentence comes before translating any of it
• Explain how to tell a subordinate clause from the main sentence, and what to do with it
• Explain how to find the main verb when Latin has delayed it
• Explain which case tells you the subject, and which tells you what is being acted on
• Explain what a new nominative later in the passage should make you do
• Explain why a line ending in verse tells you nothing about the grammar
• Say what goes wrong in a translation when the thread is dropped
• Finish with the one check worth doing if the English you have written reads oddly