Notes · LatinUK · A-Levels

Prose literature: Group 1 set text

Component 03 is the Prose Literature paper: two hours, 75 marks, a quarter of the A-Level, and the first of the two papers in which literature rather than language is what is being assessed. Section A examines a set text from the group the specification calls Group 1, and it does so in three ways at once - by asking you to translate a passage of the text into English, by asking comprehension questions on it, and by setting a 15-mark question analysing literary style, characterisation, argument and literary meaning. Which text is prescribed depends on your examination series and not on these notes: OCR prescribes prose set texts in Group 1 and Group 2, each text is examined for a maximum of three years, the lists are reviewed every three years, and centres are given a year's notice of a replacement. What does not change is the method, and the method is what these notes teach - how a set text is prepared, how Latin prose style works, how grammar becomes evidence for a literary claim, and how the 15-mark question is answered. Any author or work named below is named as an illustration of a kind of prose, never as a claim about what is prescribed.

5 sections~45 min reading time3 competenciesLevel Standard 3 · Advanced 2

T·0666 / 10

Exam profile

AO2 · Demonstrate knowledge and understanding of literature: the content, context and literary features of a prose set text read in the original languageAO3 · Critically analyse, evaluate and respond to literature: argue about style, characterisation, argument and literary meaning from the evidence of the LatinAO1 · Demonstrate knowledge and understanding of the language: translate the set text accurately into English

Operators:translateanalyseevaluatecomment onexplain the effectsupport with evidence

basic level

AS Level Latin sets prose literature on a smaller scale, with a shorter prescription and shorter analytical questions. An AS candidate needs a secure translation of the whole prescription and the ability to identify and name the commoner stylistic features with a short comment on each.

higher level

At A-Level the analytical question carries 15 marks and expects sustained argument rather than a list of devices: a claim about what the passage is doing, evidence quoted in Latin and translated, and an explanation that connects the grammar and the sound of the words to the effect being claimed. The A-Level candidate also has to hold the whole prescription in mind, because a passage is always part of a larger argument or narrative and the 15-mark question frequently depends on where in that larger structure the passage falls.

Depth

Text

Contents · 5 sections

Prose literature: Group 1 set text

What Section A asks, and what a set text has to become#

StandardOCR H443 Component 03 - Prose Literature, 2 hours, 75 marks, 25 per cent of the A-LevelOCR H443 Component 03 Section A - a set text from Group 1: translation into English, comprehension questions, and a 15-mark question on literary style, characterisation, argument and literary meaningOCR H443 - AO2 35 marks and AO3 40 marks in each literature paper

Component 03 is two hours for seventy-five marks and has three sections. Section A examines a prose set text from Group 1, Section B a prose set text from Group 2, and Section C is an essay drawing on the Group 2 text together with material the specification requires learners to read in English translation. Within Sections A and B the pattern is the same and is worth memorising, because it determines how the text has to be prepared: a passage of the set text is printed and you translate it into English; comprehension questions are asked on the passage or on the material around it; and a 15-mark question asks you to analyse literary style, characterisation, argument and literary meaning. The marks across the paper split 35 to AO2, knowledge and understanding of literature, and 40 to AO3, critical analysis and evaluation - so slightly more than half the paper is analytical rather than knowledge-based, which should be reflected in how the revision time is spent.

That structure has one immediate consequence: the set text has to become three different things in your head. It has to be a text you can translate accurately at speed, because the translation is marked as a translation and a stumbling version costs AO1-style marks even in an AO2 and AO3 paper. It has to be a text you know the content of - who says what, in what order, with what result - because comprehension questions can be asked about any part of the prescription and because the 15-mark question presupposes that you know where the passage sits. And it has to be a text you have opinions about, evidenced from the Latin, because that is what the analytical question rewards. Preparing only the first of the three, which is the default for a candidate who works by translating and re-translating, produces a script that scores in Section A's opening minutes and nowhere else.

It is worth being clear about the rotation, because candidates plan badly around it. OCR prescribes the set texts, each text remains on the list for a maximum of three years, the lists are reviewed every three years, and centres are told a year in advance if a text is to be replaced; the specification also requires that a learner meets the work of at least four different authors across the qualification. So the question 'what is the Group 1 text?' has no permanent answer, and any revision resource that gives you one is telling you about somebody else's examination series. Check the prescription for your own series against OCR's published documents at the start of the course, and check again if you are re-sitting. What these notes give you instead is the part that does not rotate: the method for turning any prose set text into examination answers.

Two printing conventions in the literature papers are worth knowing before you meet them under time. Consonantal u is printed as v, so you will see servus and vidit rather than the seruus and uidit of some scholarly texts. And an accusative plural in -is is printed as -es, so a form that a grammar might give as urbis or omnis in the accusative plural will appear on the paper as urbes and omnes. Neither convention changes the grammar; both change what the page looks like, and a candidate who has prepared from an edition with different conventions should spend ten minutes getting used to OCR's.

Finally, a word about what kind of text a prose prescription is likely to be, offered strictly as orientation and not as prediction. Roman prose literature of the kind set at this level falls into a few recognisable kinds: oratory, written to be delivered and to persuade a specific audience of something specific; historiography, written to narrate and to judge; letters, written to a named person and often with an eye on a wider readership; philosophical and rhetorical writing, argued rather than narrated; and biography, shaped around a life and its moral. Each kind sets its own analytical agenda. A speech is asking who is being persuaded of what and by what means; a history is asking what the narrator wants you to conclude about the events; a letter is asking what the relationship between writer and addressee is doing to the prose. Identify the kind first, because the 15-mark question will be about it.

Worked example

One passage, three kinds of answer

Constructed illustrative passage in the manner of Roman forensic oratory (not a quotation): quid enim, iūdicēs, hic homō nōn ausus est? domūs cīvium spoliāvit, templa deōrum violāvit, lēgēs ipsās contempsit. Produce the three answers Section A could require of these two sentences: a translation, a comprehension answer, and the opening of an analytical comment.

The translation
'For what, gentlemen of the jury, has this man not dared to do? He has plundered the houses of citizens, he has violated the temples of the gods, he has treated the laws themselves with contempt.' Note the decisions: enim is postpositive and means 'for', giving a reason for something said before; iūdicēs is a vocative and must be rendered as an address, not as a subject; ausus est is the perfect of a semi-deponent and is active in meaning; domūs is the fourth-declension accusative plural, not a genitive singular; and ipsās is emphatic, so 'the laws themselves' rather than just 'the laws'.
The comprehension answer
Suppose the question is 'Give three things the speaker accuses this man of doing. (3)'. The answer is three short phrases, visibly separated: he plundered citizens' houses; he desecrated the temples of the gods; he showed contempt for the laws. Three marks, three points, no translation of the surrounding material, and nothing said about style - because the question did not ask.
The analytical opening: the claim
An analytical comment begins with a claim, not with a list. Here: 'The speaker builds the charge as a rising sequence of violations, moving outwards from private property to religion to the state itself, and the syntax is arranged so that the sequence feels inevitable rather than argued.' That is a claim about what the passage is doing, and everything that follows will be evidence for it.
The analytical opening: the evidence
'The three charges form a tricolon - domūs cīvium spoliāvit, templa deōrum violāvit, lēgēs ipsās contempsit - and they are set out in asyndeton, with no conjunction between them, so that they accumulate without pause. Each member has the same shape, object then genitive then verb, which makes the parallelism audible; and the third member breaks it, replacing the genitive with the intensifying ipsās, so that the laws are given a weight the houses and the temples were not given.' Every observation is tied to a specific piece of Latin.
The analytical opening: the effect
'The effect is that the climax lands on the laws. The escalation from citizens to gods might have been expected to end with the gods as the gravest offence; instead the speaker places the state's own laws last and marks the position with ipsās, so that the jury is invited to conclude that the offence against them - and therefore against the jury, who are the laws' agents - is the worst of the three.' The comment has now said what the technique achieves, which is the part that carries the marks.
What distinguishes the three answers
The translation reproduces the Latin. The comprehension answer extracts information from it. The analysis makes a claim about it and proves the claim from its language. They are three different skills, they are marked differently, and the commonest error in Section A is to give the wrong one - to answer the analytical question with a paraphrase, or the comprehension question with a comment on style. Read the question and give what it asks for.

Result: Three answers from two sentences: a translation of about thirty words; a three-mark comprehension answer of three short phrases; and an analytical comment that makes a claim, evidences it from a tricolon in asyndeton with a broken third member, and explains what the arrangement achieves. The same Latin, three demands, and no overlap in what earns the marks.

Typical mistakes

Preparing a set text by translation alone, which leaves nothing to say when the analytical question arrives.
Relying on a revision resource written for an earlier examination series, whose prescribed texts may no longer be set.

Active revision

Take the first twenty lines of whatever Group 1 text your centre is preparing and produce three separate documents from them: a polished English translation, a content summary in six bullet points that would let you answer a comprehension question without looking at the Latin, and a page of analytical notes recording every stylistic feature you can name with the Latin that shows it. Repeat for every twenty lines of the prescription. When the three documents exist for the whole text, the text is prepared; before that, it is only translated.

Active recall

Recall the key points — then reveal.

Sources: OCR A Level in Latin (H443) specification (Cambridge OCR) · GCE AS and A level subject content for ancient languages (Department for Education)

Preparing a prose set text: from first reading to secure knowledge#

StandardOCR H443 Component 03 Sections A and B - translation of the set text into English, comprehension, and analysisOCR H443 - AO2: demonstrate knowledge and understanding of literatureDfE GCE AS and A level subject content for ancient languages

A set text is prepared in layers, and doing them in the right order saves a great deal of time. The first layer is the literal translation: every word accounted for, every construction identified, nothing smoothed over. Work in short sections - twenty or thirty lines - and do not move on until nothing in the section is unexplained. The second layer is the polished translation, written out separately: the same content in English that reads as English. Keeping the two apart matters, because the literal version is what you revise your grammar from and the polished version is what you will write in the examination. The third layer is the content summary, short enough to be memorised. The fourth is the analytical layer. Candidates who try to do all four at once produce notes that are unusable for any of the four purposes.

Alongside the text itself, build the context that the text assumes. Every prose work was written by somebody, for somebody, in a situation, and the 15-mark question can turn on any of the three. Who is the author and what did they want? Who is the addressee or the audience - a jury, a patron, a friend, posterity? What is the occasion, and what is at stake in it? What did the first readers already know that we have to be told? Write a single page answering those questions and keep it at the front of your notes, because it is what turns a comment about style into a comment about meaning. A tricolon is a technique; a tricolon addressed to a jury who are about to vote is an argument.

Know the shape of the whole prescription, not just the passages you have translated most recently. Draw a map of it: the sections, the turning points, where the narrative or the argument changes direction, where the author addresses the reader directly, where a character speaks. Number the sections and learn the order. The reason is practical: a printed passage in the examination is always an extract, and both the comprehension questions and the analytical question may depend on knowing what precedes and follows. A candidate who can place the passage in the argument writes a different and better answer from one who is meeting it as an isolated paragraph.

Learn the text by reading it aloud, repeatedly, in Latin. This is the most under-used revision technique in the subject and the most effective. Reading aloud forces you through every word, so you cannot skim; it fixes word order in the memory, which is what you will need when you want to quote; it makes sound effects audible, which is where half the analytical observations come from; and it is fast, so it can be done many times. Ten readings of a passage aloud will teach you more about its style than two hours of reading a commentary, and will also, incidentally, make the translation almost automatic.

Finally, memorise a small stock of quotations. You cannot and should not memorise the whole text, but an analytical answer is far stronger when it quotes, and quoting requires having the Latin. Choose perhaps two short phrases from each major section - three to six words, no more - selected because they are the passages you would most want to talk about: a striking image, a piece of characterisation, a sentence whose word order does something. Learn them exactly, with the correct forms, because a misquotation is worse than a paraphrase; if you are not certain of the wording, refer to the Latin without quoting it. In Sections A and B the passage is printed in front of you, so quotation costs nothing; it is in the Section C essay, where it is not printed, that a memorised stock earns its keep.

Worked example

Building the four layers on one short passage

Constructed illustrative passage in the manner of Roman historiography (not a quotation): eō diē nihil memorābile gestum est, nisi quod cōnsul, contrā morem maiōrum, sine auspiciīs proelium committere voluit. quod ubi in castrīs nōtum est, mīlitum animī, quī paulō ante ērēctī fuerant, subitō conciderunt. Produce all four preparation layers.

Layer one: the literal version
eō diē, ablative of time when, 'on that day'. nihil memorābile, neuter nominative singular with its adjective, subject of gestum est, perfect passive of gerō: 'nothing memorable was done'. nisi quod, 'except that'. cōnsul, subject of voluit. contrā morem maiōrum, accusative after contrā: 'against the custom of the ancestors'. sine auspiciīs, ablative after sine. proelium committere, prolative infinitive after voluit, and an idiom: 'to join battle'. quod, connecting relative, neuter, referring to the whole preceding fact. ubi ... nōtum est, temporal clause with the perfect indicative: 'when this became known'. mīlitum animī, 'the spirits of the soldiers', subject. quī ... ērēctī fuerant, relative clause, pluperfect passive: 'which had been raised'. paulō ante, ablative of measure of difference with an adverb: 'a little before'. subitō conciderunt, 'suddenly collapsed'.
Layer two: the polished version
'Nothing worth recording was done that day, except that the consul, contrary to ancestral custom, wanted to join battle without taking the auspices. When this became known in the camp, the spirits of the soldiers, which had been high only a little earlier, suddenly collapsed.' Every construction of layer one is represented, and the English is English. Note in particular that contrā morem maiōrum has been given as 'contrary to ancestral custom' rather than 'against the custom of the ancestors', which is closer to the Latin but heavier than English wants.
Layer three: the content summary
Three bullet points. One: an uneventful day. Two: except that the consul proposed to fight without the auspices, breaking with tradition. Three: when the camp learned of it, morale collapsed. That is all a comprehension question can ask about, and it can be memorised in ten seconds. Note that the summary records the causal chain - proposal, knowledge, collapse - because comprehension questions are very often 'why' questions.
Layer four: the analytical notes
The passage is doing something quite precise, and four features do it. First, litotes: nihil memorābile gestum est is an understatement that sets up the exception, and the whole weight of the sentence falls on the nisi quod. Second, the two prepositional phrases contrā morem maiōrum and sine auspiciīs are placed together, in parallel, before the infinitive, so that the offence is stated twice before the action is named. Third, mōs maiōrum is a loaded phrase, not a neutral one: it invokes the whole authority of ancestral practice, and a Roman reader hears an accusation in it. Fourth, the relative clause quī paulō ante ērēctī fuerant creates a before-and-after inside a single sentence, and conciderunt, placed last and after subitō, delivers the reversal.
The context page
For a passage like this the context questions are: what kind of work is this, and what does its author want the reader to think? A historian who reports that a commander disregarded the auspices is not reporting a scheduling matter; he is establishing a cause, and a Roman reader will expect a disaster to follow. Knowing that turns the analytical notes from a list of devices into a claim: the passage is constructed to make the coming defeat feel deserved, and every one of the four features contributes to that.
What the four layers are for
Layer one is revised when the grammar is shaky. Layer two is what gets written if this passage is set for translation. Layer three answers comprehension questions. Layer four, with the context page behind it, is the raw material of a 15-mark answer. They are built once, in order, and revised separately thereafter - which is much faster than rereading a single undifferentiated set of notes four times for four different purposes.

Result: Four layers from two sentences: a literal version identifying every construction; a polished English version; a three-point content summary; and analytical notes recording litotes, paired prepositional phrases, the loaded phrase mōs maiōrum, and a reversal delivered by word order - all read in the light of a context page that says what a Roman historian is doing when he mentions the auspices.

Typical mistakes

Producing one set of notes that is simultaneously a translation, a summary and a commentary, and is therefore useless for revising any of the three.
Preparing the passages the class translated most recently and neglecting the shape of the prescription as a whole.

Active revision

Make a one-page map of your whole prose prescription: the sections in order, a six-word description of each, and a mark against the three or four places where the argument or the narrative turns. Then close the text and reconstruct the map from memory. Repeat weekly until it is exact. Ten minutes a week for a term produces something that a printed extract can be located in instantly, which is worth more in the examination than another hour of translation.

Active recall

Recall the key points — then reveal.

Sources: OCR A Level in Latin (H443) specification (PDF) (Cambridge OCR)

Prose style: the figures and what they are for#

AdvancedOCR H443 Component 03 Sections A and B - a 15-mark question analysing literary style, characterisation, argument and literary meaningOCR H443 - AO3: critically analyse, evaluate and respond to literatureDfE GCE AS and A level subject content for ancient languages

Figures of Latin prose style

Fig. 1The Latin illustrations are constructed for this table, not quoted from any author. Read the fourth column as the point of the whole exercise: the emphasised cell says what an analytical answer has to do with any figure it names - identify what has been placed last, and say why.

Roman prose of the classical period was written by men trained in rhetoric, for readers and hearers trained in rhetoric, and its stylistic devices are not ornaments applied to a finished argument but the means by which the argument is made. That is the fact an analytical answer must be built on. Naming a tricolon earns nothing; saying what the tricolon does to the reader, and why the writer wanted that done at that point, is the whole of the mark. The table below lists the figures you are most likely to need, with a constructed Latin illustration of each and, in the last column, the kind of claim each licenses. Learn the names, because the technical term is efficient and examiners expect it; but learn the last column harder, because that is where the marks are.

Some figures work on arrangement. Tricolon is a group of three parallel members, and its force comes from the fact that three is the smallest number that establishes a pattern and completes it; tricolon crescendo, in which each member is longer than the last, adds acceleration. Anaphora repeats a word at the start of successive clauses and hammers a point. Asyndeton omits the conjunctions and makes a series feel rapid or overwhelming; polysyndeton piles them up and makes it feel exhaustive. Chiasmus arranges four elements in an ABBA pattern and produces a sense of closure or of mirroring. Antithesis sets two ideas in balanced opposition and forces a choice between them. Climax arranges items in ascending order of importance - and the analytical point is almost always what has been placed last.

Other figures work on the words themselves. Hyperbaton separates words that belong together and thereby emphasises one or both, or enacts the separation it describes. Alliteration and assonance bind words together by sound, and in prose they are much rarer than in verse, which is exactly why they are worth remarking when they occur. Hendiadys expresses one idea through two nouns joined by 'and', so that vī et armīs is not force and weapons but armed force. Litotes denies the opposite - nōn ignōrō, 'I am not unaware', for 'I know perfectly well' - and is characteristically used to sound restrained while making a strong claim. Metaphor in Roman prose is often drawn from a small set of fields - war, disease, storms at sea, the theatre - and identifying the field is usually more revealing than identifying the metaphor.

A third group works on the relationship between writer and reader. The rhetorical question does not want an answer; it invites the audience to supply one and thereby makes them complicit in the argument. Apostrophe turns aside to address someone directly - the jury, an absent person, a personified abstraction - and changes the temperature of a passage instantly. Praeteritio announces that something will be passed over and thereby mentions it. Exclamation, direct address by name, and the first-person plural that includes the audience in the speaker's position all do related work. In historiography, the equivalent devices are the narrator's aside, the attributed opinion introduced with a phrase such as 'some say', and the sententia - a short pointed generalisation, often placed at the end of a section, which invites the reader to accept a judgement as self-evident.

Two warnings, and they matter more than anything above. First, a device is only worth mentioning if it is doing something in this passage: alliteration in a sentence where nothing is being emphasised is a coincidence of Latin's limited stock of consonants, and claiming an effect for it is worse than saying nothing. Second, the effect claimed must be one the Latin can bear. It is not enough to say that a tricolon 'emphasises' - everything emphasises. Say what is emphasised, to whom, and to what end: that the three charges accumulate towards the last, that the jury is being invited to see a pattern, that the reader is being steered towards a verdict before any evidence has been offered. Specific claims are markable; general ones are not.

Worked example

Reading a rhetorical passage as an argument

Constructed illustrative passage in the manner of Roman forensic oratory (not a quotation): quid enim, iūdicēs, hic homō nōn ausus est? domūs cīvium spoliāvit, templa deōrum violāvit, lēgēs ipsās contempsit. atque haec nōn clam, nōn noctū, sed lūce clārā, spectante populō Rōmānō, facta sunt. quaerō ex vōbīs: sī tālia impūnīta relinquentur, quid tandem manēbit reī pūblicae? Identify the figures and say what the passage is doing.

The frame: two rhetorical questions
The passage opens and closes with questions that expect no answer, and the two are not the same kind. The first, quid ... nōn ausus est?, is an invitation to the jury to complete the list themselves before the speaker gives it - so the charges that follow arrive as confirmation of something the jury has already half-supplied. The last, quid tandem manēbit reī pūblicae?, moves the stakes from this defendant to the state, and it is placed after the evidence so that the jury answers it as a consequence of what they have just heard. The vocative iūdicēs in the first line is apostrophe of the plainest kind and establishes from the first clause that they, not the defendant, are the ones being addressed.
The tricolon in asyndeton
domūs cīvium spoliāvit, templa deōrum violāvit, lēgēs ipsās contempsit is a tricolon with no conjunctions. The three members are syntactically identical - object, dependent genitive, verb - and the parallelism makes the crimes feel like a single continuous pattern of behaviour rather than three separate allegations. The asyndeton removes the pauses a reader would otherwise take. Note also the climax: private houses, then the temples of the gods, then the laws - a movement outwards from the individual to the divine to the political.
The break in the pattern
The third member breaks the shape. Where the first two have a dependent genitive - cīvium, deōrum - the third has the intensifying pronoun ipsās. The effect is that the ear, which has learned the pattern, notices the substitution, and the weight falls on lēgēs. This is the single most useful kind of observation in a stylistic answer: not that a pattern exists, but that it has been broken, and where.
The second sentence: anaphora and antithesis
atque haec nōn clam, nōn noctū, sed lūce clārā ... facta sunt. nōn ... nōn ... sed is anaphora inside an antithesis: two denials in parallel, then the assertion. The two things denied are the two excuses available to a defendant - that he acted secretly, or under cover of darkness - and denying them removes both before either can be offered. lūce clārā, an ablative of time, then does the opposite work, placing the crimes in full daylight.
The ablative absolute as an argument
spectante populō Rōmānō is an ablative absolute with a present participle: 'while the Roman people watched'. Grammatically it is a subordinate circumstance; rhetorically it is the heaviest thing in the sentence, because it makes the jury's own community into witnesses and therefore into injured parties. It is also placed immediately before facta sunt, so that the last thing heard before the verb is the audience of the crime. A candidate who identifies the construction and stops has done half the job; the mark is for seeing that the construction is doing the persuading.
The conditional and the final word
sī tālia impūnīta relinquentur is an open condition with the future indicative - not a remote or unreal supposition, but something presented as a real possibility about to be decided. The neuter plural tālia generalises the charges into a class of behaviour, so that the jury is voting not on one man but on a precedent. And reī pūblicae, the dative, is the last phrase of the passage: the speaker has moved from a defendant, through the citizens and the gods and the laws, to the state itself, and the final position holds it there.
The claim the analysis supports
Put together: the passage is designed to convert a list of offences into a constitutional emergency, and it does so by escalation, by breaking its own pattern at the point it wants weight, by removing the defence's excuses before they are offered, by recruiting the Roman people as witnesses through a subordinate construction, and by ending on the state rather than the man. That single sentence is the thesis of the answer; everything above is its evidence.

Result: Figures identified: apostrophe, two rhetorical questions of different kinds, a tricolon in asyndeton with a climax and a broken third member, anaphora inside an antithesis, an ablative absolute used as the emotional centre of its sentence, an open condition, and a final emphatic dative. The claim they support: that the passage escalates a criminal charge into a question about the survival of the state, and does it by arrangement rather than by evidence.

Typical mistakes

Listing devices without explaining any of them, which produces a technically informed answer that scores very little.
Claiming an effect the Latin cannot support, such as reading emphasis into an alliteration in a passage where nothing is being emphasised.

Active revision

Take one page of your prose set text and annotate it exhaustively: mark every figure you can name, and beside each write a single sentence saying what it does at that point in the argument. Then strike out every annotation whose sentence could equally have been written about a different passage. What survives is your real analytical material, and it will be about a third of what you wrote - which is a useful measure of how much of a first attempt is generic.

Active recall

Recall the key points — then reveal.

Sources: OCR A Level in Latin (H443) specification (PDF) (Cambridge OCR)

Syntax drill: reading grammar as characterisation and argument#

AdvancedOCR H443 Appendix 5d Syntax - moods, subordinate clauses, indirect statement and extended oratio obliquaOCR H443 Component 03 - a 15-mark question analysing literary style, characterisation, argument and literary meaningOCR H443 - AO3: critically analyse, evaluate and respond to literature

The strongest analytical answers in a classical language are the ones that use grammar as evidence, because grammar is evidence nobody can dispute. Anyone can assert that a passage is menacing; a candidate who points out that every verb describing the antagonist is active and every verb describing the victim is passive has proved it. This section is a drill in reading the grammar of a passage for what it reveals about character and argument. Work through the categories below on your own set text, and you will find that most of the observations you need for a 15-mark question are already on the page in the form of endings.

Start with mood. An indicative states; a subjunctive does something else, and which something else is the point. quod with the indicative gives a reason in the writer's own voice; quod with the subjunctive gives an alleged reason, one the writer is attributing to someone else and declining to endorse - so a historian who writes that a general acted quod hostēs timēret is quietly distancing himself from the explanation. A jussive or deliberative subjunctive in a speech dramatises a character's decision-making. A relative clause of characteristic - sunt quī dīcant, 'there are those who say' - generalises. Every subjunctive in a passage is a choice, and asking why it is not an indicative is one of the fastest routes to an analytical point.

Then voice and agency. Who is the subject of the active verbs in a passage, and who is only ever the object or the agent phrase? A narrative in which one party acts and the other is acted upon is making a claim about power before it makes any explicit statement. Impersonal passives - pugnātum est, ventum est - remove the agent entirely, and a writer who uses them at a moment when a named commander might have been credited or blamed is making a decision. The gerundive of obligation asserts that something must be done and, if it carries a dative of agent, says by whom the obligation is owed; in a speech it is a way of turning an opinion into a duty.

Then tense and aspect. The historic present drops the narrative into the immediate and is almost always placed at a crisis, so its position marks what the author thinks the crisis is. The imperfect describes what was going on and can be conative, reporting an attempt that failed - so a general who resistēbat may be a general who tried and could not. The perfect states an event and closes it. A shift between these inside a paragraph is deliberate. In speeches, the future indicative makes a prediction the speaker can be held to, while a future participle with a subjunctive makes a prediction inside a reported thought, which is a much weaker commitment.

Finally, the machinery of reported speech, which is where characterisation lives in a Latin narrative. Whether a character's words are given in direct speech or in oratio obliqua is a decision with consequences: direct speech gives the character a voice and lets the reader judge them; indirect speech keeps them inside the narrator's frame and lets the narrator colour them. Inside oratio obliqua, watch the reflexive sē, which refers to the speaker and can be tracked to show whose interests a reported argument serves. Watch also which parts of a reported speech are given as accusative and infinitive - statements - and which as subjunctive - commands and questions - because the balance between them characterises a speaker as an arguer or as a giver of orders. None of these observations requires anything beyond Appendix 5d, and all of them are the kind of evidence a 15-mark answer is built from.

Worked example

Two characters built entirely out of grammar

Constructed illustrative passage in the manner of Roman historiography (not a quotation): dictātor omnia prōvīdit: exercitum īnstrūxit, praesidia disposuit, ipse in colle cōnstitit. adulēscēns interim, quod glōriam cupere vidēbātur, ā mīlitibus laudābātur; cui dictātor 'nōndum' inquit 'tempus est.' ille tamen, ratus sē contemnī, sine imperiō in hostem prōcurrit; quō factō, tōta aciēs turbāta est. Show how the grammar characterises the two men.

The dictator: active verbs and a tricolon
Every verb attached to the dictator is active and he is the subject of all of them: prōvīdit, īnstrūxit, disposuit, cōnstitit. Four active verbs in two clauses, arranged as a general statement followed by a tricolon of particulars. The grammar makes him the agent of everything that happens, and the tricolon gives the impression of a completed plan. ipse in the last member is emphatic - he did the last of the four in person - and cōnstitit, 'took his stand', is a verb of stability placed at the end of the sequence.
The young man: passive verbs and an alleged motive
The young man is not the subject of an active verb in his first sentence at all. laudābātur is passive with ā mīlitibus as its agent: things are done to him, or said about him. vidēbātur is passive in form and means 'seemed', which attributes the appearance to observers rather than stating a fact. And quod glōriam cupere vidēbātur has a subjunctive-free construction only because vidēbātur governs an infinitive; the crucial word is vidēbātur itself, which marks the desire for glory as a perception, not as something the narrator asserts. Two sentences in, the reader has a man defined by what others say of him.
The single word of direct speech
The dictator's one utterance is given in direct speech - nōndum tempus est - and it is three words long. The choice matters twice over. Direct speech in a narrative that is otherwise reported gives the words unusual weight, and the brevity characterises: a man who has already done four things and now says five syllables. Note also the connecting relative cui at the head of the clause, dative after inquit, which keeps the young man grammatically subordinate even in the sentence where he is addressed.
ratus sē contemnī
Here the young man finally becomes the subject of something, and what he is the subject of is a mistaken belief. ratus is the perfect participle of the deponent reor, so it is active in meaning - 'thinking' - and it governs an indirect statement, sē contemnī, with the reflexive sē as accusative subject and the present passive infinitive contemnī. So even at the moment when he acts, the grammar puts him inside his own head and makes him the object of the verb in his own reported thought: he thinks that he is being despised. The narrator has not said whether he was.
The action and the consequence
prōcurrit is the young man's only active main verb, and it is preceded by sine imperiō - 'without orders', an ablative of attendant circumstance that condemns the act in two words. Then the consequence arrives in a construction that removes him entirely: quō factō, an ablative absolute with a connecting relative, and tōta aciēs turbāta est, a passive with no agent expressed. The line was thrown into confusion; by whom, the Latin declines to say, which is far more damning than naming him would have been.
The claim
Written up: 'The passage characterises the two men almost entirely through grammar. The dictator is the subject of four active verbs in the first sentence and speaks the only direct speech in the passage, three words of it; the young man is the subject of no active verb until he disobeys, is defined first by what the soldiers say of him and then by what he mistakenly believes of himself, and disappears from the syntax altogether at the moment of the disaster he causes, which is reported as an agentless passive.' That is a 15-mark answer's thesis, and every word of it can be proved from an ending.

Result: The dictator: four active verbs with himself as subject, a tricolon of completed preparations, an emphatic ipse, and three words of direct speech. The young man: a passive and a verb of seeming, an alleged motive attributed to observers, a deponent participle governing his own mistaken belief, one active verb qualified by sine imperiō, and an agentless passive for the consequence. No adjective of judgement is used about either man anywhere in the passage.

Typical mistakes

Treating the grammar and the literary comment as separate exercises, so that the analysis rests on impressions rather than on evidence.
Overlooking who the agent is: a passage in which one side is never the subject of an active verb is making a claim that is easy to prove and easy to miss.

Active revision

Take a page of your set text and make four columns: every finite verb with its mood, every finite verb with its voice and its subject, every finite verb with its tense, and every instance of reported speech with its construction. Then write three sentences of literary comment, each of which rests on something in one of the four columns. If you cannot write three, the page is more neutral than you thought - which is itself worth knowing before the examination.

Active recall

Recall the key points — then reveal.

Sources: OCR A Level in Latin (H443) specification (PDF) (Cambridge OCR)

Exam technique: the 15-mark literary question#

StandardOCR H443 Component 03 Sections A and B - a 15-mark question analysing literary style, characterisation, argument and literary meaningOCR H443 - AO3 40 marks and AO2 35 marks in each literature paperOCR H443 Component 03 - 2 hours for 75 marks across three sections

The 15-mark question is the largest single question in Sections A and B and it is where the two literature papers are won and lost. It asks you to analyse literary style, characterisation, argument and literary meaning in a printed passage. Three things follow from that wording and should govern every answer. First, it is analysis, so a paraphrase of the passage scores nothing however accurate. Second, the four listed dimensions are not all present in every passage, and the question wording will usually steer you to one or two; read the question and answer the question asked, not the general question 'say something about this passage'. Third, literary meaning is in the list, which means that at some point the answer has to say what the passage is for - what a reader is being brought to think or feel.

Budget the time before the paper starts. Two hours for seventy-five marks is about one and a half minutes a mark, so the 15-mark question deserves something in the region of twenty minutes including planning, and the paper as a whole needs to be divided in advance between Section A, Section B and the Section C essay. The commonest structural failure in this paper is an over-long answer to the first 15-mark question, which then takes its time out of the essay. Write the intended finishing time for each section on the paper before you begin, and treat those times as fixed.

Plan the answer, briefly and always. Three or four minutes with a pencil produces a much better twenty-minute answer than starting immediately. The plan has three parts. One: the claim, written out as a single sentence - what is this passage doing? Two: three or four pieces of evidence, each a short Latin phrase from the printed passage, chosen because they support the claim and because you can say something precise about each. Three: an order for them, which should normally follow the passage from beginning to end, because that lets you show how the effect is built. Then write, and let the plan hold you to the claim; the characteristic weak answer is one that starts with a thesis and then drifts into a running commentary.

The unit of a good answer is the point, and a point has four parts in a fixed order: the claim about this moment in the passage, the Latin quoted, a translation or gloss of the quotation, and the explanation of the effect. Skip any of the four and the point is incomplete. Quoting without translating leaves the examiner unsure whether the Latin was understood; translating without explaining is comprehension, not analysis; explaining without quoting is assertion. Keep quotations short - two to six words - so that they point at one thing. Three or four such points, each fully developed, is a stronger answer than eight half-made ones, and it is also what fits into twenty minutes.

Two final disciplines. Use the technical vocabulary, but never as a substitute for the analysis: 'the tricolon in asyndeton accelerates the list of charges so that they arrive as one continuous pattern of behaviour' is worth several times 'there is a tricolon in asyndeton, which is effective'. And end with the meaning. An answer that has made four good local points and stopped has not said what the passage is for; two sentences at the close, drawing the points together into a statement about what the reader is being brought to think, convert a competent answer into a strong one. That closing move is also the one place where knowing the rest of the prescription pays, because the meaning of a passage is usually a function of where it sits in the whole.

Worked example

A 15-mark answer planned and opened

Constructed illustrative passage in the manner of Roman epistolary prose (not a quotation): scrībis mihi tē valēre. gaudeō. sed quod addis tē mox ventūrum esse, id vērō nōn crēdō: nam ter mihi idem prōmīsistī, ter mē fefellistī. venī tamen, sī potes; nam hortus noster, quem tū numquam vīdistī, iam flōret, et sine tē silet domus. The question: 'Analyse how the writer conveys his feelings towards his correspondent in this passage. (15)'. Produce the plan and the first two points.

Read the question first
The question asks about the writer's feelings towards his correspondent. That is characterisation and tone, not argument, and not the whole passage indiscriminately. So the plan should select the material that bears on the relationship between the two men, and should not spend a point on, for example, the horticultural vocabulary unless it can be tied back to that relationship - which, as it happens, it can.
The claim
One sentence: 'The writer moves in a few lines from clipped scepticism to open affection, and the shift is carried by sentence length, by a pointed repetition, and by the choice of what he puts last.' That claim is specific, it is arguable, and it can be evidenced in four places. Write it down and do not deviate from it.
The evidence, chosen and ordered
Four short quotations, in passage order. One: gaudeō, a single word forming a whole sentence. Two: ter mihi idem prōmīsistī, ter mē fefellistī, the repeated ter with two second-person perfects. Three: venī tamen, sī potes, an imperative softened by a condition. Four: sine tē silet domus, the last clause of the passage. Each is short, each points at one thing, and together they trace the movement the claim describes.
Point one, written out
'The writer's warmth is at first almost withheld. His response to the news that his correspondent is well is gaudeō - one word, one sentence, and it means simply I am glad - placed between two much longer sentences. The brevity is not coldness but restraint: a single first-person verb, with no object and no elaboration, in a passage that will end in a much more open declaration. Its position is what makes the point: the reader registers how little is said here only when the last sentence says a great deal.'
Point two, written out
'The scepticism that follows is made by repetition. ter mihi idem prōmīsistī, ter mē fefellistī - three times you have promised me the same thing, three times you have deceived me - repeats ter at the head of both clauses, drops the conjunction between them, and pairs two second-person perfect verbs in the same final position. The anaphora turns a complaint into a pattern and the asyndeton makes that pattern feel closed, and the pattern is the argument: the writer does not say that his friend is unreliable, he shows that the same thing has happened the same number of times. The shift from mihi in the first clause to mē in the second keeps the writer himself grammatically present in both halves of the injury, first as the person promised and then as the person deceived.'
How the answer would close
The remaining two points would treat venī tamen, sī potes - an imperative immediately qualified, so that the invitation is issued and the pressure withdrawn in the same breath - and sine tē silet domus, where the personified house and the placement of the clause at the very end of the passage give the affection the last word. Then two closing sentences returning to the claim: the passage is arranged so that the reproach comes first and briefly and the affection last and unguarded, which is how the writer manages both to complain and to invite. Four points, a claim stated at the start and confirmed at the end, and about twenty minutes.

Result: A claim in one sentence, four short quotations in passage order, and two fully written points each containing claim, Latin, translation and effect. The plan took four minutes; the four points and the close would take sixteen. The structural discipline - select for the question asked, order by the passage, end with the meaning - is what makes the difference between fifteen marks and eight.

Typical mistakes

Writing a running paraphrase of the passage with occasional device names attached, instead of an argued analysis.
Over-running on the first 15-mark question and taking the time out of the Section C essay.

Active revision

Practise the plan, not the essay. Take a passage from your set text, set a timer for four minutes, and produce only the plan: a one-sentence claim, four short Latin quotations, and the order. Do this for twenty different passages before you write a single full answer. Planning is the skill that transfers between passages; the prose is only execution, and execution improves quickly once the plan is reliable.

Active recall

Recall the key points — then reveal.

Sources: OCR A Level Latin (H443) - specification at a glance (Cambridge OCR)

References & sources

Sources

Cambridge OCR

Department for Education

GCE AS and A level subject content for ancient languages

Prose literature: Group 1 set text

5 sections~45 min reading time3 competenciesLevel Standard 3 · Advanced 2

What Section A asks, and what a set text has to become#

Standard

OCR H443 Component 03 - Prose Literature, 2 hours, 75 marks, 25 per cent of the A-Level

OCR H443 Component 03 Section A - a set text from Group 1: translation into English, comprehension questions, and a 15-mark question on literary style, characterisation, argument and literary meaning

OCR H443 - AO2 35 marks and AO3 40 marks in each literature paper

Syntax drill: reading grammar as characterisation and argument#

Advanced

OCR H443 Appendix 5d Syntax - moods, subordinate clauses, indirect statement and extended oratio obliqua

OCR H443 Component 03 - a 15-mark question analysing literary style, characterisation, argument and literary meaning

OCR H443 - AO3: critically analyse, evaluate and respond to literature

Prose literature: Group 1 set text

Key points

One passage, three kinds of answer

Key points

Building the four layers on one short passage

Key points

Reading a rhetorical passage as an argument

Key points

Two characters built entirely out of grammar

Key points

A 15-mark answer planned and opened

Sources

Prose literature: Group 1 set text

Key points

One passage, three kinds of answer

Key points

Building the four layers on one short passage

Key points

Reading a rhetorical passage as an argument

Key points

Two characters built entirely out of grammar

Key points

A 15-mark answer planned and opened

Sources