The Ablative Absolute: urbe capta, signo dato, Cicerone consule
The participles article stopped one step short on purpose. It taught you , amatus and amaturus, showed you that a participle is a subordinate clause folded into a word, and then pointed at a construction it refused to open. This is that construction, and it is the most characteristically Latin thing in the language.
The shape
, milites redierunt.
The city having been taken, the soldiers returned.
Two words. A noun in the ablative, a participle in the ablative agreeing with it in case, number and gender. And critically: neither of them has any grammatical connection to the rest of the sentence. Delete and redierunt is still a whole sentence with a subject and a verb.
That detachment is the whole point, and it is what absolute means here. The word is from , to loosen or release. An ablative absolute is an ablative loosened from the sentence it sits in.
Compare the two:
| Latin | What captam / capta attaches to | Type |
|---|---|---|
| captam . | , the object of | ordinary participle |
| , discessit. | nothing in the main clause | ablative absolute |
In the first, is doing a job: it is what the king saw. In the second, the city is not seen, taken by, or otherwise involved in discessit; it merely sets the scene. So it goes absolute.
This gives you a working rule that is worth holding firmly: if the noun already has a role in the main clause, you cannot use an ablative absolute. Use a plain agreeing participle instead. Latin writers keep to this far more reliably than they keep to most of their rules, and the handful of breaches you will eventually meet are worth noticing rather than imitating.
All three participles
Perfect passive, by a distance the commonest. The action is finished before the main verb happens.
dato- when the signal had been given
His dictis- after these words had been spoken
- once the enemy had been beaten
His cognitis- having learned this
Present active. The action runs at the same time as the main verb.
- as the sun was rising
audientibus- with everyone listening
regnante- while the king was reigning
One small form point that catches people out: a present participle inside an ablative absolute takes the ablative in -e, not -i. That is the participle ending rather than the adjective ending, and the participles article flagged the same split. , never orienti.
Future active. Vanishingly rare, and honestly you should learn to recognise it rather than to write it. Classical prose almost never does it; later Latin occasionally will. If you meet casura for the city being about to fall, you now know what it is.
The one with no verb in it
Latin has no present participle of . There is no word for being. Later philosophers coined ens for their own purposes, but it is not part of the Latin you will be reading.
So Latin does the obvious thing: it drops the participle entirely and puts two nouns in the ablative side by side.
| Latin | Literally | English |
|---|---|---|
| Cicerone | Cicero being | in Cicero's consulship |
| Caesare | Caesar being leader | with Caesar in command |
| Me | me being a boy | when I was a boy |
| you being the instigator | on your initiative | |
| His | these men being witnesses | with these men as witnesses |
An adjective works in the same slot: me invito means with me unwilling, that is, against my will.
Because there is no participle, there is no tense marker. Cicerone says nothing at all about when; you read the time off the main verb. Cicerone puts it in the past because is past. This is also how Romans dated things: the consuls' names in the ablative were the year.
Translating it into English a human would write
Here is the part that separates a passable translation from a good one. Word for word, is the city having been captured. That is grammatical English and it is dreadful English, and if you leave it there you have transcribed the Latin rather than translated it.
Latin supplies no conjunction. The relationship between the phrase and the main clause is left open, and English cannot leave it open for long. So you choose, deliberately:
| Sense | Latin | English |
|---|---|---|
| Time | , redierunt. | After the city was taken, the soldiers returned. |
| Cause | , . | The army fled because its leader was dead. |
| Concession | , timebat. | Although the enemy had been beaten, the people were afraid. |
| Condition | , redibunt. | If peace is made, everyone will come back. |
| Sequence | His cognitis, Caesar . | Caesar learned this and set out. |
Three techniques worth having in hand:
- Turn it active. The doer is almost always sitting in the main clause.
, redieruntbecomes after the soldiers had taken the city, they returned. - Turn it into a noun. After the capture of the city, the soldiers returned. Often the cleanest option, and it keeps the compression the Latin had.
- Turn it into a main clause and join with and. The soldiers took the city and returned. In narrative this is frequently what the Latin actually feels like.
Why Caesar built his prose out of them
The structural reason first. Latin has no perfect active participle for ordinary verbs, as the participles article laboured. It cannot say having captured the city. The ablative absolute is the main workaround, and it is used constantly for exactly that reason.
The stylistic reason second. A war narrative is a chain of things that happened after other things happened. His cognitis is two words where English needs six. Caesar's commentarii run on these phrases: they pick up the previous sentence, compress it into an ablative, and move immediately to the next action. Watch for the connecting relative that the pronouns article covered, because it fuses with the construction beautifully: cognitis, when he had learned these things.
Do not conclude that more is always better. It is a prose-narrative register. Verse and dialogue use far fewer, and a translation that renders every one of them the same way flattens the writing.
Spotting one while reading
Scan for a bare ablative noun with no preposition in front of it, sitting near the front of the sentence, followed shortly by a word ending -o, -a, -e, -is or -ibus that agrees with it. The -e is the one people forget, because it is how a present participle ends in this construction: . Then check whether the noun has a job in the main clause. If it does not, you have an ablative absolute, and you should read the pair as a unit before going any further.
The ablative uses article listed the many other things a bare ablative can be, and this is one more to add to the list, but it is the only one that comes in a matched pair.
What to take away
- Noun in the ablative plus participle in the ablative, agreeing, and detached from the main clause.
Absolutemeans loosened, from. If the noun has a job in the sentence, use an ordinary participle instead.- Perfect passive is commonest:
dato,his cognitis. - Present active is simultaneous and takes
-e: - Future is rare enough to recognise rather than write.
- No participle of
, so two nouns do the job:Cicerone,Caesare,me. - Never leave having been done in your English. Pick when, after, because, although, if, or rewrite as a noun phrase.
- It plugs the perfect-active-participle gap, which is why Caesar's narrative is built on it.