Notes · LatinUK · A-Levels

Unseen prose translation (Livy)

Section A of Component 01 is a passage of unseen Latin narrative prose, to be translated into English for 50 marks - a sixth of the whole qualification, in about fifty minutes, with no vocabulary list and no dictionary. The specification names the source: the prose passage will be taken from Livy. That is unusually helpful, because it means the register, the sentence architecture and the narrative furniture of the passage can all be prepared in advance. Livy writes long periodic sentences whose main verb is often at the end and whose subordination is carried by participles and ablative absolutes rather than by conjunctions; he uses the historic present and the historic infinitive to accelerate; he prefers the older third-person plural perfect in -ēre; and his subject matter is a small, repeating world of consuls, camps, envoys, standards, hills and rivers. These notes work through that world in order: who Livy is and what a passage of him looks like; how to dismantle a long period; how to turn the dismantled Latin into English an examiner will recognise as English; a drill on the narrative tenses and connectives that hold a Livian paragraph together; and the method itself, minute by minute, in the examination.

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

T·0333 / 10

Exam profile

AO1 · Demonstrate knowledge and understanding of the Latin language by translating an unseen passage of Latin prose accurately into EnglishAO2 · Demonstrate knowledge and understanding of literature: recognise the register and narrative conventions of Roman historical proseAO3 · Critically analyse and evaluate: judge, from the context, which of several possible renderings the passage requires

Operators:translaterenderidentify the main verbanalyse the sentencejustify the tensechoose the English

basic level

The AS Level paper also sets unseen prose translation, but with a Defined Vocabulary List behind it and a shorter, syntactically plainer passage. An AS candidate should be able to handle a sentence with one or two levels of subordination, an ablative absolute, an indirect statement and a purpose or result clause, and should be secure in the six indicative tenses.

higher level

The A-Level passage is unadapted Livy. Expect three or four levels of subordination inside one sentence, subjunctives inside reported speech, participles carrying the weight that English gives to finite verbs, ellipse of forms of sum, vocabulary outside any published list, and stretches of extended oratio obliqua. Expect also the poetic and archaic colouring - the -ēre perfect, the historic infinitive, the occasional poetic word order - that Livy uses to raise the register at moments of crisis.

Depth

Text

Contents · 5 sections

Unseen prose translation (Livy)

Livy and the register of Roman historical prose#

StandardOCR H443 Component 01 Section A - translation into English of an unseen passage of Latin narrative prose taken from Livy (50 marks)OCR H443 Component 01 - 1 hour 45 minutes, 100 marks, 33 per cent of the A-Level, AO1 onlyDfE GCE AS and A level subject content for ancient languages

Titus Livius, whom English calls Livy, was born at Patavium - modern Padua - and lived from about 59 BC to AD 17, so his working life spans the collapse of the Republic and the whole of the Augustan settlement. His single work, Ab Urbe Condita, narrated Roman history from the foundation of the city to his own day in one hundred and forty-two books, of which Books 1 to 10 and 21 to 45 survive, some of them incomplete; for the rest we have only summaries. What matters for an examination candidate is not the bibliography but the consequence: the specification names Livy as the source of the Section A passage, so the prose you will be asked to translate has a known author, a known register and a known set of habits. That is a preparation opportunity most unseen papers do not offer, and the candidates who exploit it read the paper faster than those who do not.

Livy's subject matter is narrow and repetitive in a way that helps enormously. A Livian passage is very likely to concern an army, a city, a magistrate and a decision: consuls and dictators, legions and cohorts, standards and camps, envoys and hostages, hills and rivers and bridges, senates debating and crowds reacting. The consequence for vocabulary work is direct. A candidate who has made the military and political core absolutely automatic - aciēs, agmen, castra, cōnsul, cōpiae, dictātor, eques, exercitus, fossa, imperium, impetus, legiō, lēgātus, mūrus, obses, ordō, pedes, praesidium, proelium, signum, subsidium, tribūnus, vāllum, and the verbs that go with them - is reading the running text of the passage without hesitation and spending their thinking time on the syntax, which is where the difficulty actually is.

The sentence architecture is the real challenge. Livy writes periodic prose: a sentence is built as a single suspended structure in which the main clause is held back, sometimes to the very last word, while subordinate material accumulates in front of it. That material is carried by participles and ablative absolutes far more than by conjunctions, so a period that would need four finite verbs in English may have one finite verb in Latin and three participles. The reader's task is therefore not to translate left to right but to locate the frame first and hang the rest on it. This is a learnable skill and it is the single most valuable thing to practise for this paper, which is why the next section is devoted to it entirely.

Livy also raises and lowers his register deliberately, and the markers are worth knowing on sight. He uses the historic present freely, switching into it at the moment of crisis and back out of it afterwards - which is why a present-tense verb in a past narrative is not an error in the text and should usually be rendered as an English past. He uses the historic infinitive, a bare present infinitive with a nominative subject, for rapid or confused action: trepidāre mīlitēs, arma poscere means 'the soldiers were panicking, calling for their arms', and there is no finite verb to be found because there is not meant to be one. He prefers the older third-person plural perfect ending in -ēre to -ērunt, so cōnspexēre, incubuēre, fuēre; a candidate who reads these as infinitives loses the main verb. And he admits poetic vocabulary and poetic word order at heightened moments, so the passage may briefly not sound like prose at all.

One more feature of his prose is easy to describe and easy to be caught by: variatio, the deliberate avoidance of exact parallelism. Where a plainer writer would balance two clauses in the same shape, Livy will express the first with an ablative absolute and the second with a cum-clause, or the first with a noun and the second with a gerund, so that the two halves of a sentence do the same work by different grammatical means. The practical implication is that you cannot predict the second half of a Livian sentence from the shape of the first. Read the second half on its own terms. Candidates who assume symmetry produce translations in which one of the two halves has been quietly invented, and invented Latin is the most expensive kind of error there is, because it usually takes several marks' worth of clause with it.

Worked example

Reading the register of a battle narrative

Constructed illustrative passage in the Livian manner (not a quotation): clāmor undique ortus est; trepidāre mīlitēs, arma poscere, signa efferre. dux, relictō equō, ipse in prīmam aciem prōcurrit; quem ubi mīlitēs cōnspexēre, redintegrātā spē, in hostem incubuēre. Identify every feature of register and translate.

clāmor undique ortus est
orior, orīrī, ortus sum is a deponent, so ortus est is 'arose', not 'was arisen'. A short, plain, finite opening sentence: Livy often sets the scene with one of these before the syntax becomes complicated. Translate 'A shout arose on all sides'.
trepidāre mīlitēs, arma poscere, signa efferre
Three historic infinitives with mīlitēs, a nominative subject, and no finite verb anywhere in the sentence. This is the construction, not a corruption of the text. Note the asyndeton - no conjunctions between the three - which contributes to the effect of confused, simultaneous activity. Render with English past continuous or with 'began to': 'the soldiers were panicking, calling for their weapons, bringing out the standards'. A string of plain past tenses also works; what does not work is a laborious 'proceeded to panic', which kills the speed the Latin is producing.
relictō equō
An ablative absolute: equō ablative singular, relictō the perfect passive participle of relinquō agreeing with it. Literally 'the horse having been left behind'. English wants a subordinate clause or a participial phrase attached to the leader: 'leaving his horse' or 'having dismounted'. The construction is grammatically detached from the main clause, which is what makes it available for this compression.
prōcurrit
Formally ambiguous: prōcurrō has a perfect prōcurrī or prōcucurrī, so prōcurrit could be present or perfect. In a narrative of this kind it is a historic present, and Livy uses it exactly here, at the moment of decisive action. Translate as an English past - 'ran forward into the front rank' - and note that ipse marks the emphasis: the leader himself, in person.
quem ubi mīlitēs cōnspexēre
Two features at once. quem is a connecting relative: a relative pronoun at the head of a sentence or clause, referring back to something in the previous sentence and functioning as 'and him' or 'him'. English does not begin sentences with relatives, so it must be turned into a demonstrative or a conjunction: 'and when the soldiers caught sight of him'. cōnspexēre is the -ēre third person plural perfect of cōnspiciō, equivalent to cōnspexērunt.
redintegrātā spē, in hostem incubuēre
A second ablative absolute - 'their hope having been renewed' - and a second -ēre perfect, incubuēre from incumbō. in with the accusative here means 'against', not 'into'. hostem is a collective singular, normal in military prose and to be rendered as an English plural: 'they bore down on the enemy'. Four of the six clauses in this short passage carry a register marker, which is a fair sample of what the paper looks like.

Result: A shout arose on all sides; the soldiers were panicking, calling for their weapons, bringing out the standards. The leader, leaving his horse, ran forward himself into the front rank; and when the soldiers caught sight of him, their hope renewed, they bore down on the enemy. Register markers: an opening finite sentence, three historic infinitives in asyndeton, two ablative absolutes, a historic present, a connecting relative and two third-plural perfects in -ēre.

Typical mistakes

Reading a third person plural perfect in -ēre as a present infinitive, which removes the main verb of the sentence.
Translating a historic present as an English present, which produces a narrative that switches tense for no reason the examiner can see.

Active revision

Take any page of Livian narrative with a facing translation. Before reading the English, mark every historic present, every historic infinitive, every third plural perfect in -ēre and every ablative absolute. Count them. Then read the English and check whether the translator rendered each historic present as an English past, each historic infinitive as a past continuous or a 'began to', and each ablative absolute as a subordinate clause with an explicit connective. You are reverse-engineering the conventions you will be marked against.

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)

Dismantling the period: the order of operations#

AdvancedOCR H443 Component 01 Section A - unseen narrative prose from LivyOCR H443 Appendix 5d Syntax - subordinate clauses, including subordinate clauses within indirect speech and extended oratio obliquaDfE GCE AS and A level subject content for ancient languages

The order of operations on a Latin period

Fig. 1Five steps, always in this order. The emphasised node is the one that decides everything downstream: until the main verb is found, every other decision in the sentence is provisional, and candidates who skip it spend the sentence revising guesses instead of reading.

A Latin period is not read left to right and it is not translated left to right. It is a frame with material hung inside it, and the frame has to be found before anything else can be placed. The order of operations is fixed, it works on every sentence in the paper, and it should be so well drilled that it costs no conscious thought: find the main verb, find its subject, mark the boundaries of every subordinate clause, unpack the participles and the ablative absolutes, and only then build the English. Candidates who translate word by word from the left are guessing at the structure and revising the guess as they go, which is slow and produces the characteristic error of a translation whose second half contradicts its first. Candidates who find the frame first are reading, and reading is much faster than guessing.

Finding the main verb means finding the finite verb that is not inside a subordinate clause. Two things make it findable. First, position: in Livy it is very often at or near the end of the sentence, so look there before you look anywhere else. Second, mood: a main verb in a narrative is normally indicative, so a sentence full of subjunctives usually has its indicative main verb still to come. Watch for the sentence with more than one main verb joined by et, -que or a plain comma, and watch for the sentence whose main verb is a form of sum that has been left out altogether, since Latin ellipses est and sunt freely - urbs capta, with no verb, means 'the city was captured' or 'the city, having been captured'. Deciding which of those two a bare participle is doing is the commonest single decision in a Livian passage.

Marking the subordinate clauses is a physical operation on the page and should be done with a pencil. Every subordinating conjunction - cum, ut, nē, quod, quia, quamquam, quamvīs, sī, nisi, dum, postquam, ubi, priusquam, antequam - opens a clause, and every relative pronoun opens a clause; the clause runs until its own verb, which is usually its last word. Draw brackets. Once the sentence is bracketed you can see the frame, and you can also see the nesting: which clause sits inside which. Nesting matters because it determines the tense sequence and, in reported speech, the mood. A subordinate clause inside an indirect statement has its verb in the subjunctive whatever mood it would have had in direct speech, and a candidate who has not bracketed will read those subjunctives as purpose or result clauses and invent a logical relation that is not there.

Unpacking participles is the step where Latin's compression is undone. A perfect passive participle agreeing with a noun in the sentence usually corresponds to an English subordinate clause; an ablative absolute always does; a present participle corresponds to an English 'as' or 'while' clause, or sometimes just to a relative clause. The question to ask of each is: what is the logical relation between this participle and the main verb - time, cause, concession, condition? Latin leaves it unstated and English must state it, and the choice is a translation decision that carries marks. urbe captā can be 'when the city had been captured', 'because the city had been captured' or 'although the city had been captured', and only the narrative tells you which. Reading the sentence after the one you are translating is often the fastest way to find out.

Only then do you build the English, and building it is a separate operation with its own rules. English is a word-order language: it wants subject, verb, object, and it wants subordinate clauses introduced by conjunctions in positions where an English reader expects them. The Latin order is not preserved for its own sake, and a translation that keeps the Latin order is usually unreadable. What is preserved is the emphasis, wherever English can manage it - a word Livy put first for effect can often be put first in English too, and where it cannot, an English equivalent of the emphasis can usually be found. Write the English sentence as a sentence, read it back, and ask whether an intelligent reader who knew no Latin would understand it. If not, it is not finished, however accurate the parsing behind it.

Worked example

One period, taken apart clause by clause

Constructed illustrative sentence in the Livian manner (not a quotation): cōnsul, cum ex explōrātōribus cognōvisset hostēs, quī trāns flūmen castra posuissent, nocte profectōs esse, mīlitibus imperāvit ut sine tumultū sequerentur, ratus eōs, sī celeriter īnsequerētur, ante lūcem opprimī posse. Work through the five steps and translate.

Step 1: the main verb
Scan for a finite indicative verb that is not inside a subordinate clause. cognōvisset is subjunctive and sits after cum, so it belongs to a cum-clause. posuissent is subjunctive and sits after quī. sequerentur is subjunctive after ut. īnsequerētur is subjunctive after sī. That leaves imperāvit, third person singular perfect indicative active of imperō - the main verb, and it sits almost exactly in the middle of the sentence rather than at the end, which is a useful reminder that 'usually near the end' is a tendency and not a rule.
Step 2: the subject
cōnsul, nominative singular, the first word of the sentence. Everything between cōnsul and imperāvit is subordinate. Note that the subject has been separated from its verb by twenty words, which is entirely normal and is precisely why the first two steps must be done before any translation begins.
Step 3: bracket the clauses
Four brackets. [cum ... cognōvisset ... profectōs esse] is a circumstantial cum-clause with the pluperfect subjunctive. Inside it, [hostēs ... profectōs esse] is an indirect statement dependent on cognōvisset, with hostēs as its accusative subject and profectōs esse, the perfect infinitive of the deponent proficīscor, as its verb - active in meaning, 'to have set out'. Inside that, [quī ... posuissent] is a relative clause; its verb is subjunctive not because it is purposive but because it is a subordinate clause inside reported speech. After the main verb, [ut ... sequerentur] is an indirect command, and inside the final participial phrase, [sī ... īnsequerētur] is a conditional clause, again subjunctive because it stands inside reported thought.
Step 4: unpack the participles
ratus is the perfect participle of the deponent reor, rērī, ratus sum, so it is active in meaning - 'thinking', 'reckoning' - and it agrees with cōnsul, nominative singular masculine. It governs its own indirect statement: eōs ... opprimī posse, with eōs the accusative subject, posse the present infinitive of possum, and opprimī the present passive infinitive of opprimō. So the consul thought that they could be overwhelmed. Note that the unexpressed subject of īnsequerētur is the consul himself; had Latin needed to name him inside the reported thought it would have used the reflexive sē.
Step 5: the small decisions
ex explōrātōribus: ex with the ablative of the source of information, 'from his scouts'. nocte: ablative of time when, 'during the night'. sine tumultū: sine with the ablative, and tumultus is fourth declension, so tumultū - 'without any disturbance', a military idiom worth having. imperāvit takes a dative of the person commanded, mīlitibus, and ut with the subjunctive for the content of the order; sequerentur is the imperfect subjunctive of the deponent sequor in historic sequence. ante lūcem: ante with the accusative, 'before daybreak'.
Step 6: build the English
English will not tolerate the Latin order. Put the frame first or nearly first, unpack ratus into a participial phrase or a coordinate clause, and give each bracketed clause an English conjunction: 'When the consul had learned from his scouts that the enemy, who had pitched camp across the river, had set out during the night, he ordered his soldiers to follow without any disturbance, reckoning that if he pursued quickly they could be overwhelmed before daybreak.' Read it back: it is an English sentence, and every clause of the Latin is present in it.

Result: When the consul had learned from his scouts that the enemy, who had pitched camp across the river, had set out during the night, he ordered his soldiers to follow without any disturbance, reckoning that if he pursued quickly they could be overwhelmed before daybreak. Structure: MAIN (imperāvit) with subject cōnsul, preceded by a cum-clause containing an indirect statement containing a relative clause, and followed by an indirect command and a deponent participle governing a second indirect statement containing a conditional clause.

Typical mistakes

Translating left to right and revising the structure as the sentence unfolds, which produces a second half that contradicts the first.
Reading a subjunctive inside reported speech as a purpose or result clause, and inventing a logical connection the Latin does not make.

Active revision

Take five long sentences from a page of Livy. Without translating a word, do only the mechanical operations: circle the main verb, underline its subject, bracket every subordinate clause, and box every participle and ablative absolute. Then, still without translating, write in the margin the shape of the sentence as a formula - for example, 'abl. abs. + cum-clause (containing ind. statement) + MAIN + participle phrase'. Only after all five are mapped should you translate any of them. Separating the analysis from the rendering is what makes both of them fast.

Active recall

Recall the key points — then reveal.

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

Rendering: turning analysed Latin into English#

StandardOCR H443 Component 01 - translation into English; all candidate work is in EnglishOCR H443 Assessment objective AO1 - demonstrate knowledge and understanding of the languageDfE GCE AS and A level subject content for ancient languages

Latin construction to natural English

Fig. 2The middle column is what a candidate writes when they stop after the analysis; the right-hand column is what earns the mark. The emphasised cell is the conversion that appears in almost every Livian sentence, and the one most often left half-done.

Translation is two operations, and conflating them is the commonest reason a well-prepared candidate underperforms. The first operation is analysis: establishing what the Latin says, which is a question with a right answer. The second is rendering: deciding how English says that, which is a question with several defensible answers and many indefensible ones. A candidate who has done the analysis perfectly and the rendering badly produces a translation that is correct in the sense that a marker can see the parsing behind it, but that reads as a gloss rather than as English - and translation marks in a Latin paper reward the English as well as the Latin. Write the English as though the examiner will read it aloud, because in effect they will.

The house style for a school translation is close but not literal. Every Latin word should be represented, and no English word should be present that has no warrant in the Latin; within that constraint, English idiom governs. A perfect participle becomes a subordinate clause. An ablative absolute becomes a subordinate clause with the connective the context implies. An indirect statement becomes a that-clause with the tense English requires, which is not always the tense the infinitive has. An impersonal passive becomes an active English sentence with an indefinite subject, or a noun phrase - pugnātum est is 'there was fighting' or 'they fought'. A historic present becomes an English past. A collective singular such as hostis or mīles becomes an English plural. None of these is a liberty; each is what the Latin means.

Some transformations are less obvious and are worth learning as fixed conversions, which is what the table sets out. Latin's dative of possession - cōnsulī magna auctōritās erat - is English's 'have': 'the consul had great authority'. Latin's gerundive of obligation with a dative of agent is English's 'must', with the dative becoming the English subject: urbs cōnsulī dēfendenda est is 'the consul must defend the city'. Latin's ad with a gerundive is an English purpose clause. Latin's connecting relative, which begins a sentence with quī or quod, becomes an English demonstrative or conjunction, because English sentences do not begin with relative pronouns. Latin's double negative is an English positive: nōn nūllī means 'some' and nōn nēmō means 'more than one person'. Each of these is a small piece of machinery; together they are most of what makes a translation read well.

Two dangers sit at the ends of the spectrum. At one end is the wooden translation that leaves Latin structures standing in English clothes: 'the city having been captured, the leader, the soldiers having been followed, a messenger to Rome sent'. This is not English and an examiner cannot read it as a rendering of the sense, even though every word is accounted for. At the other end is the free translation that paraphrases: 'after his victory the general reported back'. This reads beautifully and it has thrown away the ablative absolute, the participle and the tense, all of which carried marks. The target sits between them and closer to the literal end: every grammatical feature represented, and the sentence still readable as English. When in doubt, be closer to the Latin, because you can be marked for what is there and not for what is elegant.

Finally, be systematic about the details that are individually small and collectively expensive. Tenses: imperfect is 'was doing' or 'used to do', pluperfect is 'had done', future perfect is 'will have done', and English's habit of blurring these is not available to you. Number: a Latin plural is an English plural, and vice versa, unless a collective singular forces the change. Cases: an ablative of means is 'by' or 'with', an ablative of manner takes 'with' and usually an adjective, an ablative of separation takes 'from'. Names: keep the Latin form or use the conventional English one consistently - Rōma is Rome, but a personal name unfamiliar in English should simply be transliterated, not invented. And read the whole translation back at the end against the Latin, sentence by sentence, checking that nothing has been dropped; dropped clauses are the largest single source of avoidable loss in this paper.

Worked example

The same sentence rendered three times

Constructed illustrative sentence (not a quotation): pontibus interruptīs, cōnsul, quī nūllum subsidium exspectābat, lēgātōs ad senātum mīsit ad auxilium petendum; nam commeātū prohibitī mīlitēs iam nōn nūllī dēserere coeperant. Write a wooden version, a free version and the version that would be marked, and say what is wrong with the first two.

Version one, wooden
'The bridges having been broken, the consul, who no help was awaiting, envoys to the senate sent for help to-be-sought; for from supply hindered soldiers now not none to desert had begun.' Every word is accounted for and the English is unreadable. The two ablative absolutes and the gerundive phrase have been left standing in Latin shape, the relative clause keeps Latin word order, and the double negative has been transliterated rather than translated. An examiner cannot award full credit for a sentence whose sense they must reconstruct.
Version two, free
'With the bridges down and no relief in sight, the consul sent to Rome for help; his supply lines were cut and desertions had begun.' This reads well and it has thrown away: the perfect passive participle interruptīs (rendered as a noun phrase), the relative clause quī ... exspectābat (rendered as a phrase with no verb), the specific lēgātōs (envoys, not an unspecified 'sent to'), the specific senātum (the senate, not 'Rome'), the gerundive purpose phrase, the participle prohibitī and the pluperfect coeperant. Seven markable features have gone, and the sentence gives no evidence that the candidate could see any of them.
Version three, the target
'When the bridges had been destroyed, the consul, who was expecting no relief, sent envoys to the senate to ask for help; for the soldiers, cut off from their supplies, had now begun - some of them - to desert.' Every construction is represented: the ablative absolute as a temporal clause, the relative clause as a relative clause with its imperfect intact, the gerundive phrase as an English purpose clause, prohibitī as a participial phrase, and nōn nūllī as 'some of them'.
The decisions inside version three
pontibus interruptīs: 'when the bridges had been destroyed' - the temporal connective is chosen because the sentence goes on to describe the consequence. exspectābat: imperfect, so 'was expecting', not 'expected'. ad auxilium petendum: ad with a gerundive is purpose, so an English infinitive of purpose. commeātū prohibitī: commeātus is fourth declension, ablative commeātū, an ablative of separation with prohibitī - 'cut off from their supplies'. coeperant: pluperfect, so 'had begun', which matters because it places the desertions before the sending of the envoys and thereby explains it.
A note on word order and emphasis
Latin put pontibus interruptīs first, and English can keep it first: the emphasis survives the translation at no cost. Latin put nōn nūllī immediately before dēserere, throwing weight onto the fact that it was not nobody. English can reproduce that with a parenthesis - 'had now begun - some of them - to desert' - or by fronting it. Where the emphasis can be kept, keep it; where keeping it would break the English, let it go and take the accuracy instead.

Result: When the bridges had been destroyed, the consul, who was expecting no relief, sent envoys to the senate to ask for help; for the soldiers, cut off from their supplies, had now begun - some of them - to desert. The wooden version fails because it is not English; the free version fails because seven grammatical features have vanished; the target version keeps both, which is the whole of the skill.

Typical mistakes

Leaving Latin structures standing in English - 'the city having been captured' - instead of turning them into English subordinate clauses.
Paraphrasing a clause instead of translating it, which throws away every grammatical feature the clause carried.

Active revision

Take a paragraph you have already translated and translate it again from the Latin without looking at your first version. Then compare the two side by side, clause by clause, and for every place they differ decide which is closer to the Latin and which reads better as English. Where the same version wins on both counts, that is your rendering. Where they conflict, write a third version that resolves the conflict. Doing this three times on the same paragraph is worth more than translating three new paragraphs.

Active recall

Recall the key points — then reveal.

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

Syntax drill: narrative tenses and the connectives that hold a paragraph together#

AdvancedOCR H443 Appendix 5d Accidence - verbs in all moods, voices and tensesOCR H443 Appendix 5d Syntax - temporal clauses; description; direct statementOCR H443 Component 01 Section A - unseen narrative prose

Latin narrative runs on four tenses and each of them does a specific job. The perfect is the ordinary tense of events: it moves the story forward, one completed action after another. The imperfect is the tense of background: it describes what was going on while the events happened, what used to happen, what was being attempted - and it is often conative, describing an attempt rather than an achievement, so resistēbant may be 'they tried to resist'. The pluperfect places an event before the events: it supplies the causes and the preconditions. And the historic present interrupts all three at moments of crisis, dropping the narrative into the immediate. A candidate who renders all four as an English simple past has thrown away the shape of the paragraph, and the shape is markable: an imperfect rendered as a perfect is a specific inaccuracy that a mark scheme can identify.

The relations between those tenses are what a paragraph is made of, and they are usually signalled by temporal conjunctions with their own rules. postquam, ubi, ut and simul atque, meaning 'after', 'when' and 'as soon as', take the perfect indicative in Latin where English would often use a pluperfect: postquam haec audīvit is 'after he had heard this'. dum meaning 'while' takes the present indicative even in a past narrative, so dum haec geruntur is 'while this was going on'. dum meaning 'until' takes the subjunctive, as do priusquam and antequam when purpose or expectation is involved. cum with the imperfect or pluperfect subjunctive is the circumstantial cum-clause of past narrative; cum with the indicative in a present or future context is a plain 'when'. Learning these as a group, with the tense they take, removes a whole class of hesitation from the paper.

Connectives are the second half of the machinery, and Latin uses far more of them than English does. Some are simply conjunctions: et, atque or ac, -que, sed, at, aut, vel. Others carry an argumentative relation and must be translated as such - nam and enim give a reason ('for'), itaque and igitur give a consequence ('and so', 'therefore'), tamen concedes ('however'), autem marks a mild contrast or a change of subject, quidem concedes a point before contradicting it, vērō emphasises, cēterum introduces the next thing ('for the rest', 'however'), praetereā adds. Several of these are postpositive - autem, enim, igitur, quidem and vērō stand second in their clause, never first - and a candidate who is looking for the connective at the beginning of the sentence will not see them. Note also that Latin joins sentences with connectives far more consistently than English does, so a translation may legitimately drop the occasional autem where English simply starts a new sentence.

The connecting relative deserves its own treatment because it is so common in historical prose and so alien to English. Latin habitually begins a sentence with a relative pronoun that refers back to the previous sentence: quī, quae, quod, quem, quibus, and the phrases quae cum ita sint ('and since this is so'), quō factō ('and when this had been done'), quā dē rē ('for which reason'). Grammatically it is a relative; functionally it is a demonstrative plus a conjunction. English must convert it: quem ubi cōnspexit becomes 'and when he caught sight of him', quibus rēbus cognitīs becomes 'and when he had learned of this'. Once you know that any sentence-initial part of quī is doing this job, a construction that looks like a fragment resolves instantly.

One last habit of Latin narrative repays drilling: the participle chain. Livy will string two or three ablative absolutes or participial phrases in front of a main verb, each one advancing the story a step - the bridges having been broken, the camp having been pitched, the enemy having been sighted, the consul ordered ... English can rarely take three such phrases in a row without collapsing. The remedy is to convert some of them to finite verbs joined by 'and', which is a legitimate rendering because the Latin phrases are narrating a sequence: 'the consul broke down the bridges, pitched camp, and, when the enemy came into sight, gave the order'. Every element is represented and the English is readable. Deciding which phrases to convert and which to keep subordinate is a judgement, and making it deliberately - rather than by default - is what distinguishes a fluent translation.

Worked example

Four tenses and five connectives in one paragraph

Constructed illustrative passage (not a quotation): postquam cōnsul in castra rediit, omnia parāta invēnit. mīlitēs enim, quī per tōtam noctem laborāverant, vāllum iam perfēcerant. dum haec geruntur, nūntius ā lēgātō missus advenit; quī cum dē adventū hostium nārrāvisset, cōnsul tamen nihil timēre vidēbātur. itaque prīmā lūce ipse in aciem prōcēdit. Parse every finite verb, identify every connective, and translate.

postquam ... rediit
postquam with the perfect indicative: rediit is third person singular perfect of redeō. Latin uses the perfect, English wants a pluperfect - 'after the consul had returned to camp'. The temporal clause establishes the moment; invēnit, also perfect, is the main verb - 'he found everything ready'. parāta is the perfect passive participle of parō, neuter accusative plural agreeing with omnia, used predicatively.
mīlitēs enim ... perfēcerant
enim is postpositive: it is the second word of its sentence and it means 'for', giving the reason why everything was ready. The relative clause quī ... laborāverant has a pluperfect - 'who had worked through the whole night' - and the main verb perfēcerant is also pluperfect: 'had already finished the rampart'. Two pluperfects, both supplying preconditions for the perfect invēnit in the previous sentence. That is the pluperfect doing exactly its narrative job. per tōtam noctem is an accusative of extent of time.
dum haec geruntur
dum meaning 'while' takes the present indicative even inside a past narrative, so geruntur is present passive of gerō but must be rendered as an English past: 'while this was going on'. This is one of the few places where Latin's tense and English's tense are simply not the same, and it must be learned rather than reasoned out. advenit, the main verb, is perfect - 'a messenger sent by the officer arrived'. missus is a perfect passive participle agreeing with nūntius, with the agent in ā plus the ablative.
quī cum ... nārrāvisset
quī is a connecting relative at the head of the sentence, referring back to nūntius: 'and when he ...'. Inside it, cum with the pluperfect subjunctive nārrāvisset is a circumstantial cum-clause: 'when he had told of the enemy's arrival'. dē adventū: dē with the ablative, and adventus is fourth declension. The main verb is vidēbātur, imperfect passive of videō used personally - 'seemed' - with the prolative infinitive timēre. tamen is the concessive connective: 'nevertheless the consul seemed to be afraid of nothing'.
itaque ... prōcēdit
itaque is a consequential connective standing first in its sentence: 'and so'. prīmā lūce is an ablative of time when - 'at first light'. prōcēdit is a historic present: formally present, narratively past, and placed at the decisive moment. Render it as an English past: 'he himself advanced into battle line'. ipse marks that he did it in person, which is the point of the sentence.
What the tenses have built
Read as a sequence: a pluperfect layer (the night's work) underneath a perfect layer (the return, the discovery, the arrival) underneath a present layer (the crisis), with one imperfect (vidēbātur) describing a state rather than an event. Five connectives - postquam, enim, dum, tamen, itaque - carry the logic: sequence, reason, simultaneity, concession, consequence. A translation that flattens all five tenses to a simple past and drops two of the connectives loses the paragraph's argument even though every word is present.

Result: After the consul had returned to camp, he found everything ready. For the soldiers, who had worked through the whole night, had already finished the rampart. While this was going on, a messenger sent by the officer arrived; and when he had reported the enemy's approach, the consul nevertheless seemed to be afraid of nothing. And so at first light he himself advanced into the battle line. Tenses: perfect (event), pluperfect (precondition), present for dum, imperfect (state), historic present (crisis). Connectives: postquam, the postpositive enim, dum, tamen and itaque, plus one connecting relative.

Typical mistakes

Missing a postpositive connective - autem, enim, igitur - because it is the second word of its clause rather than the first.
Reading a sentence-initial relative pronoun as the start of a subordinate clause, and then finding no main clause to attach it to.

Active revision

Take a paragraph of Latin narrative and make two lists. List one: every finite verb, with its tense and the job that tense is doing - event, background, precondition or crisis. List two: every connective and connecting relative, with the logical relation it expresses. Then write the paragraph's argument in six English sentences using only your two lists, without translating. If the argument makes sense, you have understood the paragraph; the translation is now a matter of execution.

Active recall

Recall the key points — then reveal.

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

Exam technique: the unseen prose translation, minute by minute#

StandardOCR H443 Component 01 - 1 hour 45 minutes, 100 marks; Section A 50 marks, Section B 50 marksOCR H443 Component 01 Section A - unseen prose translation from LivyOCR H443 Assessment objective AO1 - demonstrate knowledge and understanding of the language

The arithmetic of Component 01 should be decided before you enter the room, not during it. The paper is one hour forty-five minutes for one hundred marks, and it is split exactly in half: fifty marks for the Livy prose in Section A and fifty for the Ovid verse in Section B, with two lines to be scanned in the second. Equal marks means equal time, so the working plan is roughly fifty minutes on each section with five minutes at either end for reading and checking. Candidates lose marks in this paper far more often by mismanaging that split than by not knowing Latin: verse feels harder, so it gets rushed, or prose feels safer, so it gets polished, and either way one half of the paper is written in twenty minutes. Decide the split in advance, write the two clock times on the question paper at the start, and hold to them.

For the granular marking, look at the mark scheme published with a past series rather than at any general claim. The specification tells you the total for the section and nothing finer; the mark schemes show how a passage is actually divided and what an examiner treats as an error. Reading one properly, with the paper beside it, is one of the highest-value hours in the whole course, and it will settle several questions that are otherwise guesswork - how much a wrong tense costs, whether a good guess at an unknown word gets anything, how a dropped clause is treated. Whatever the detail, one principle holds and can be planned around: the marks are distributed across the whole passage, so completing the passage adequately beats perfecting a third of it.

The reading minutes at the start are not optional and are not wasted. Read the English title or introduction that heads the passage, because it tells you who the people are and what is happening, and both will resolve ambiguities later. Then read the whole Latin passage through once without translating, at the pace you would read a newspaper in a language you know imperfectly. You are not trying to understand it; you are looking for the shape - where the sentences end, where the direct or reported speech starts and stops, which proper names recur, whether the passage is a battle, a debate, a journey or a siege. A candidate who knows the genre of the passage before translating the first sentence will make better lexical choices in every sentence after it.

Then work sentence by sentence, and write as you go. Do not translate the whole passage in your head or in note form and then write it out: there is no time, and the second pass will not happen. For each sentence, run the five steps - main verb, subject, brackets, participles, English - and write a complete English sentence before moving on. Leave a line between sentences so that a correction later has somewhere to go. When a word will not come, put your best guess in and mark the margin with a light pencil dot; when a whole clause will not come, translate everything around it, leave a gap of the right size, and dot the margin. Never stop the passage for one word. The clause you are not translating while you stare at it is worth more than the word you are staring at.

The last five minutes are for checking, and checking has a specific agenda rather than a general re-read. First, completeness: does every Latin sentence have an English sentence, and does every clause inside it appear? Dropped clauses are the largest avoidable loss in this paper and they are invisible unless you look for them deliberately. Second, the dotted margins: go back to the words you guessed, and see whether the rest of the passage has since told you what they mean - it very often has. Third, tenses: run down your English looking only at the verbs, and check each against the Latin. Fourth, sense: read your English through as English and stop at anything that a reader would query. A sentence that does not make sense is almost always a sentence in which something has been misparsed, and finding it in the last minute is worth several marks.

Worked example

A short passage under examination conditions, with the decisions annotated

Constructed illustrative passage in the Livian manner (not a quotation): dictātor, cōnsiliō convocātō, docuit nihil sibi cum hostibus agendum esse priusquam novae cōpiae advēnissent. hoc cōnsilium plērīsque displicuit; nam mīlitēs, quibus longa mora molesta erat, pugnāre cupiēbant. dictātor tamen, in sententiā manēns, castra mūnīrī iussit. quō factō, hostēs, spē pugnae adēmptā, discessērunt. Translate as you would in the examination, showing the decisions and the margin dots.

Sentence 1: the frame
Main verb docuit (perfect of doceō, 'he explained', 'he informed'), subject dictātor. cōnsiliō convocātō is an ablative absolute - 'a council having been called', so 'after calling a council'. docuit governs an indirect statement whose verb is agendum esse, a gerundive of obligation in the infinitive: nihil sibi ... agendum esse, 'that nothing was to be done by him'. sibi is a dative of agent with the gerundive, and it is reflexive because it refers back to the subject of the verb of saying - the dictator himself. cum hostibus, 'with the enemy'. Rendering: 'that he must have no dealings with the enemy'.
Sentence 1: the temporal clause
priusquam ... advēnissent: priusquam with the pluperfect subjunctive, expressing anticipation - the action is looked forward to rather than merely dated - and standing inside reported speech, which is a second reason for the subjunctive. novae cōpiae, 'fresh troops', nominative plural. 'Until fresh troops had arrived.' Note that English 'until' rather than 'before' reads better after a negative main idea, and it is not a liberty: the Latin sense is that nothing is to be done in the interval.
Sentence 2: two datives and a relative
displicuit takes a dative of the person displeased, plērīsque - 'most of them', dative plural of plērīque. So 'this plan displeased most of them', or more naturally 'most of them disliked this plan'. nam introduces the reason. The relative clause quibus longa mora molesta erat is a dative of the person affected with a predicative adjective: 'to whom the long delay was troublesome', naturally 'who found the long delay irksome'. cupiēbant is imperfect - 'were eager', a state, not an event.
Sentence 3: participle and passive infinitive
in sententiā manēns is a present participle agreeing with dictātor - 'holding to his opinion', or 'standing by his view'. iussit takes an accusative and infinitive: castra mūnīrī, with mūnīrī the present passive infinitive - 'ordered the camp to be fortified'. This is the construction that distinguishes iubeō from imperō, which takes a dative and ut; if you have drilled that pair, the sentence costs no thought at all. tamen is the concessive connective and should be rendered.
Sentence 4: connecting relative and two ablative absolutes
quō factō is a connecting relative inside an ablative absolute: literally 'which having been done', functionally 'and when this had been done'. spē pugnae adēmptā is a second ablative absolute, from adimō, adimere, adēmī, ademptum, to take away - 'the hope of battle having been removed', naturally 'now that the hope of a battle had been taken from them'. discessērunt is the perfect main verb. Two absolutes in one short sentence is normal and the English can carry both if one is turned into a clause and the other into a phrase.
The check
Completeness: four Latin sentences, four English sentences; count the clauses - eleven in the Latin, eleven in the English. Margin dots: suppose you had dotted adēmptā; the sense 'the hope of battle having been taken away' is recoverable from the fact that the enemy then leave, so the guess can now be firmed up. Tenses: docuit perfect, advēnissent pluperfect subjunctive rendered as a pluperfect, displicuit perfect, erat and cupiēbant imperfect and rendered as continuous, iussit perfect, discessērunt perfect. Sense: read the English aloud; it is a coherent short narrative, which is the last and best test.

Result: After calling a council, the dictator explained that he must have no dealings with the enemy until fresh troops had arrived. Most of them disliked this plan; for the soldiers, who found the long delay irksome, were eager to fight. The dictator, however, standing by his view, ordered the camp to be fortified. And when this had been done, the enemy, now that the hope of a battle had been taken from them, withdrew. Time: about eight minutes for four sentences, which is the rate needed to finish a Section A passage inside fifty minutes with the check still to come.

Typical mistakes

Translating in the head or in note form and running out of time before the English is written down.
Stopping the whole passage on one unknown word instead of guessing, marking the margin and moving on.

Active revision

Do one timed unseen prose passage a week from now until the examination, always at fifty minutes, always written out in full sentences, and always with the last five minutes reserved for the four-point check. Mark it yourself against a published mark scheme rather than against a translation, because a translation tells you what the passage means and a mark scheme tells you what the marks are for. Keep a single running list of the errors you actually made; after six weeks that list, and not a grammar book, is your revision syllabus.

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

Unseen prose translation (Livy)

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

Livy and the register of Roman historical prose#

Standard

OCR H443 Component 01 Section A - translation into English of an unseen passage of Latin narrative prose taken from Livy (50 marks)

OCR H443 Component 01 - 1 hour 45 minutes, 100 marks, 33 per cent of the A-Level, AO1 only

DfE GCE AS and A level subject content for ancient languages

Unseen prose translation (Livy)

Key points

Reading the register of a battle narrative

Key points

One period, taken apart clause by clause

Key points

The same sentence rendered three times

Key points

Four tenses and five connectives in one paragraph

Key points

A short passage under examination conditions, with the decisions annotated

Sources

Unseen prose translation (Livy)

Key points

Reading the register of a battle narrative

Key points

One period, taken apart clause by clause

Key points

The same sentence rendered three times

Key points

Four tenses and five connectives in one paragraph

Key points

A short passage under examination conditions, with the decisions annotated

Sources