Latin Reference — Vol. VIII.a: The Passive Voice

Vol. IV built the verb engine and Vol. VIII ran it through every tense of the indicative — but always with the subject doing the work. This volume turns the camera round. Latin can say the same event from the other end, and it does so with a single extra syllable bolted onto endings you already know.

The trigger sentence, from Ørberg's road to Rome:

Saccī quī ā Syrō et Leandrō portantur magnī sunt. The sacks that are carried by Syrus and Leander are big.

Against its active twin:

Saccī quōs Syrus et Leander portant magnī sunt. The sacks that Syrus and Leander carry are big.

Same sacks, same shoulders, same road. What changes is which participant Latin decides to make the subject.

The swap

Three things move at once, and they always move together:

Promote the object, demote the doer, swap the ending. Once you can run that swap in both directions on sight, the rest of this volume is bookkeeping.

Note the third column of that table can be empty. Latin drops the agent constantly, and so does English: the sack is carried tells you nothing about who's carrying it, and often that's exactly the point. Inscriptions in particular love this — positum est, "it was set up", by persons the stone doesn't trouble to name.

The present passive endings

Four of the six are simply the active ending with -r or -ur stuck on the back, which is the shape to hold in your head: -r is the mark of the passive across the whole system. The odd one out is -minī, which looks unnervingly like a nominative plural noun; historically it probably was one, an old participle pressed into service, and it never quite lost the look.

All four conjugations, present passive

The third conjugation stays scruffy exactly where Vol. IV said it would: short -e- in regeris, weakened to -i- in regitur and regimur, and -untur rather than -entur in the plural.

Aside — the macron moves. Vowels shorten before a final -t, which is why portat has a short -a-. Add the passive syllable and the vowel is no longer final, so its natural length comes back: portā́tur, audī́tur, monḗtur. If you're marking macrons as you read, this is one of the places the rule earns its keep — the length isn't decoration, it's the stem showing through.

Who did it: ā/ab against the bare ablative

Latin distinguishes a doer from a means, and the distinction is worth having.

So is equō vehitur — "he is carried by horse" — has no ab, because the horse is transport rather than an agent with an opinion. But Iūlius ab Ursō et Dāvō portātur does, because Ursus and Davus are people doing a job. Ørberg never states this rule; he simply puts both on the same page and waits.

This is the ablative doing what Vol. I said it does — source, means, accompaniment — and the ā/ab half is the same "away from" sense you met in ablātum, carried away. The action comes from the agent.

The relative clause shifts too

Worth pausing on, because it trips people who have the verb sorted:

The pronoun takes its case from the job it does inside its own clause, and the voice of that clause's verb decides the job. Change the voice, change the pronoun. This is a good early test of whether the swap has really gone in.

Imperfect and future

Both are built on the present stem, and both simply take the passive endings in place of the active ones. Nothing new to learn beyond the substitution.

Imperfect passive — was being ——ed, used to be ——ed. The -bā- of Vol. VII, unchanged:

Future passive — will be ——ed. First and second conjugations keep their -bi-; third and fourth use the -ē- future:

The other half: participle plus sum

Here the system changes shape entirely. The perfect, pluperfect and future perfect passive are two words — a perfect passive participle, which behaves as an ordinary first/second declension adjective and agrees with the subject, plus a form of sum.

The participle changes to match its subject in case, number and gender, exactly as Vol. III demands: saccus portātus est, epistula missa est, dōna data sunt.

The trap. Est is a present-tense word sitting inside a past-tense construction, and it will lie to you every time until it stops:

Read the participle as the thing carrying the tense, and sum as a hinge. Once you internalise that portātus already means "having been carried", the est stops looking like a present tense and starts looking like the joint it is.

Aside — the stone you already know. Vol. V gave you hic situs est as "here lies", flagged as literally "is placed". With this volume in hand you can see it properly: situs is a perfect passive participle, so the phrase is "he has been laid here" — a completed act, not an ongoing one. The same shape runs through the whole epigraphic vocabulary of building and burial: positum est (it was set up), factum est (it was made), restitūtum est (it was restored), dēdicātum est (it was dedicated). Where the dedicator wants his own name in the record you get the active fēcit or posuit; where the record is of the thing rather than the man, the passive does the work and nobody need be named.

The participle is where English keeps its nouns

The fourth principal part — that perfect passive participle — is the single most productive Latin form in English. This is the etymological payoff of the volume, and it's a large one.

Every one of these entered English as a thing that has been done to — a fact is something made, a script something written, a mission something sent. The passive isn't an exotic corner of Latin grammar; it's the seam the language leaks into English through.

Aside — passive itself. The grammatical term comes from passīvus, from passus, the participle of patī — to suffer, to undergo. The passive subject undergoes rather than acts. The same root gives patient (one who undergoes), passion (in its older sense, suffering) and compassion (undergoing alongside). And patī is itself a deponent, which is the next section's problem.

The middle sense — when passive isn't passive

Some verbs in the passive don't mean "is done to" so much as "does to itself" or simply "does". Greek had a whole voice for this, the middle; Latin lost the separate forms and let the passive cover the ground.

English does the same trick without noticing: the door opened, the milk spilled, the ice melted — no agent, no passive marker, the thing simply undergoes. When a passive reads absurdly in English, try the middle sense before assuming you've misparsed.

Deponents — the forms without the meaning

A small but very common class of verbs has passive forms and active meanings, having "laid aside" (dēpōnere) their active forms altogether. There is no rule to derive them; they're learned as vocabulary.

Sequitur looks like "he is followed" and means "he follows". Nōn sequitur — "it does not follow" — is the deponent sitting in English legal and philosophical prose unchanged.

A handful of semi-deponents are active in the present system and deponent in the perfect: audeō, audēre, ausus sum (dare); gaudeō, gaudēre, gāvīsus sum (rejoice); soleō, solēre, solitus sum (be accustomed).

Aside — impersonal passives. Verbs that take no object can still go passive, with nothing to promote — so they go third-person singular and mean roughly "there is ——ing". Ītur — "there is a going", people go. Pugnātur — "there is fighting". Vīvitur — "one lives". It's an odd construction to meet cold, but it's how Latin gets an agentless statement out of an intransitive verb, and it turns up in Tacitus with some frequency. File it and move on.

Worked sentences

Self-test

The drill

Take the worked sentences from Vols IV and VII and flip each one, aloud, in both directions — active to passive and back. Mīles templum videt / templum ā mīlite vidētur, over and over, until the three-part swap happens without deliberation. Then push each flipped sentence through the tenses: vidētur, vidēbātur, vīsum est, vīsum erat. Saying the last two aloud is the fastest cure for the est trap, because your ear learns that the two-word forms sit in the past regardless of what sum appears to be doing.

For reading practice, Ørberg's chapter that introduces this is the right size of dose — he gives you the passive in the present tense only, which is the half that works by ending-swap. The participle-plus-sum half arrives later, and this volume is here for when it does.

See also: Vol. I — the case system for the ablative's range; Vol. III — adjective agreement for how the participle behaves; Vol. IV — the verb engine for the active endings this volume mirrors; Vol. V — stone Latin for the passive on inscriptions; Vol. VII — the verb workshop for the imperfect and the conative sense of cōnārī.