53 Explōrātiō Undecima (XI) Adventure Eleven
Servius Sulpicius, letter to Cicero Passive Voice, Present System The Passive Verb videor Diminutives
Tusculum, Italia Mēnsis Februārius
M. Aemiliō Lepidō L. Munātiō Plancō cōnsulibus
A
Tusculum, Italy February, 42 BCE
lthough the sun was up, the sky was low and cold that morning as we made our way along a muddy mountain road. Grey clouds in the distance framed a column of smoke rising from a villa that had been burned to the ground the previous night. Behind us lay
a small walled town called Tusculum. Latinitas pointed in the direction of Rome for me, but at this distance the intervening hills made it impossible to see anything of the city. I was more struck by a line of sharp montēs, the mountains immediately to our south which seemed to form a kind of bowl. “That’s the site of Alba Longa – my birthplace and the homeland of the Latin people. The ridge you’re looking at is the rim of a long-extinct volcano.”
The land around us was covered in vineyards, leafless at this time of the year. In the field we were walking past a solitary plowman was steering a small wooden plow, his legs covered in mud; from his home, a hut with a thatch roof, I could hear the cry of a rooster. Further up the road lay our destination, a palatial rustic villa hidden from view by a line of cypress trees. At its entrance stood a group of men with gladiīs. They eyed us warily, arms folded. Latinitas, who was dressed completely in black, told me not to worry; they were expecting us. “To be more precise: they are expecting a woman named Servilia, who lives not far from here. Last night I offered her a large cup of poppy tea to relieve her stress over the future of her son, the regicide Brutus. I’m taking her place so that she can sleep in today. The Cicero family knows we are coming. But don’t say anything as we enter.” There was certainly no risk of that happening.
“Caesar, you remember, was assassinated by Brutus and Cassius just before our last visit. Afterward, they and the other ‘Liberators’, as they call themselves, let the opportunity they created slip through their hands. They just assumed that once the dictator was gone, Rome would simply return to its old Republican ways – fools. Caesar’s supporters were less complacent; they took the initiative and began working together. Three men emerged as dūcēs. First, Mark Antony, Caesar’s most capable and charismatic officer, who you saw at the mime show. Second,
Octavian, Caesar’s twenty-year old nephew, adopted son and heir. And third, another of Caesar’s former officers named Lepidus. Together they formed a ruling team called the Triumvirate that pressured the Senate into giving them absolute power. Once the Liberators realized how much trouble they were in, they left Italy for Greece, and began collecting legions for the civil war that everyone can now see is coming.”
“One of the first things the Triumvirs did after seizing power was to eliminate their enemies. They drew up a list, a proscription list, which was posted all over Italy and advertised rewards for the killing of those who were named on it. Mark Antony included Cicero’s name because he wanted revenge for the bitter attacks the orator made on him in the Senate. A little over a month ago, a group of assassins tracked down Cicero at his coastal villa, which is not far from here.
They tore him from the litter in which he was traveling, cut off his head and his hands, and nailed them to the Rostrum, the platform in the Roman Forum from which he had given so many speeches.”
“Family members of those proscribed, like Servilia, the mother of Brutus, have mostly been spared, but as you can imagine, no one feels safe. Today Cicero’s son Marcus and his ex-wife Terentia are meeting here at the family’s Tusculan villa. Young Marcus is about to sail to Greece to join the Liberators; in his absence, Terentia will be managing the family estate. They are being joined by two other men, Cicero’s freedman Tiro and his lifelong friend Atticus. Tiro is trying to collect all of Cicero’s letters, speeches, and books in one place so that he can publish them and preserve the literary legacy of his patron and former master. Atticus is here to offer whatever help he can. As an Epicurean and a diplomat, he has managed to maintain his friendship with all the big names at Rome, even those on opposite sides of this awful war.
Servilia – that is, me – is joining the gathering to see what she can offer. In addition to being Brutus’s mother, she was also Caesar’s mistress. She has long been a fēmina of considerable intelligence and insight.”
Once we passed the guards, we could just make out the four figures inside the entrance of the villa engaged in earnest conversation. Latinitas had me sit out of the way on a bench and left me with these instructions.
“First I want you to learn some more vocabulary; when I come back, I will teach you about verbs in the Passive Voice. Right now, memorize these words, starting with this irregular verb:”
meminī, memin-isseto remember, to remember how to
“Like coepī, this verb only has perfect forms. But this verb has perfect forms with present tense meanings: so, translate the perfect form meminit, not as ‘he she it remembered’, but as ‘he she it remembers’, present tense.”
“TODAY, GIVE THE MARKED UP AND POLISHED VERSIONS OF EACH SENTENCE.”
Annum mortis meminī Caesaris; tūne diem meministī? (1)
2nd Conjugation (E-Verb)
videor, vid-ērīto seem, to appear; to seem right
2nd Declension Noun
oculus, ocul-īm.eye
3rd Declension Nouns
honor, honōr-ism.honor
mulier, mulier-isf.woman
aetās, aetāt-isf.age
cīvitās, cīvitāt-isf.city
necessitās, necessitāt-isf.necessity
US-A-UM Adjectives
cārus, cār-a, cārumprecious
ūnus, ūn-a, ūnumone“You know this word already. What is new are
the irregular genitive and dative singular, ūnīus and ūnī.”
Irregular Adjective
totso many
Prepositions
ā / ab + ablativeby “A new meaning for a word you’ve already learned.”
ante + accusativebefore
post + accusativeafter, behind
Conjunctions
antequam + clausebefore
postquam + clauseafter
Adverbs
antebeforehand, previously
postafterward
adhūcstill, so far
dextrāon the right “This is short for manū dextrā, on the right hand.”
sinistrāon the left
quemadmodumjust as, the way in which, how
Then she left. When I was finished with my vocab notes, I looked up to see that the group of four was gone. Right then Latinitas snuck up on me from behind and shouted, Tū, venī mēcum!, “You, come with me,” which almost gave me a heart attack before I realized who it was.
We walked into the inner part of the villa, through a labyrinth of gorgeous rooms with colorful and elaborately painted walls – sadly, there was no time to sight-see – before emerging in a garden surrounded by porticoes. At the end of one portico lay the entrance to a room. It looked like a wine cellar on the inside, with crisscross wooden shelves forming nooks; the nooks, though, were full of papyrus scrolls. This was the house’s main bibliothēca, its library. A man with a familiar face was working inside, surrounded by several buckets of scrolls and wax-tablets; he was taking them out and filing them in their appropriate places in the bookcase. He was so intent on his work that he did not even acknowledge us.
“You remember the man we encountered on the night of Cicero’s Catilinarian oration? This is him, Tiro, Cicero’s secretary, iterum, once again. To atone for insulting me, he has dedicated his life to preserving everything Cicero wrote, all priceless treasures of the Latin language. These are the books and letters that he brought up last night from Cicero’s seashore villa at Astura.”
“At our meeting Tiro told us that, besides the professional bounty hunters, there are gangs out there in the countryside killing random family members of the proscribed to see how much the Triumvirs will give for the heads. So instead of traveling here directly, he took a boat to the swamps around Lavinium, then followed an abandoned road inland with this precious cargo of books.”
“When the darkness comes,” she added, “humans try to save themselves and the people close to them first. If they have any time or energy left, they try to rescue whatever precious bits of their culture they can get their hands on. Later generations continue their mission when they make the effort to curate what was rescued; and sometimes the darkness returns, making it necessary to rescue the objects from destruction or oblivion or misuse yet again. That’s one reason, a very profound one, that some people study Latin.”