Latin · Chapter 5 · Lesson 14 · Grammar primer
The passive voice and deponent verbs
Amatur, he is loved - and then sequitur, which looks passive and means he follows. Deponents are the trap the passive sets, and this corpus is full of them.
The short version
The perfect passive is two words, and it means was, not is
The present, imperfect and future passives just swap the personal endings for -r, -ris, -tur, -mur, -mini, -ntur, so amo becomes amor. From the perfect onwards Latin changes method entirely and uses the fourth principal part plus a form of sum. Urbs capta est means the city was captured, not is captured, because the participle is already finished and est only supplies the frame. That mistranslation is the standard one.
Urbs capta est.
Deponent verbs wear the passive and mean the active
Loquor is I speak, sequor is I follow, patior is I suffer, morior is I die. They take every passive ending in the book, mean something entirely active, and hand out ordinary direct objects while they do it. Their perfect is the two-word type, locutus sum, I spoke. In a genuine passive, meanwhile, the doer is ab plus the ablative for a person and a bare ablative for a thing: a rege visus est, gladio victus est.
locutus sum
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