Latin Infinitives and Indirect Statement: dicit regem venire

English reports speech with a small word: he says that the king is coming. Latin does not have that word, and does not want it. It restructures the sentence instead.

The six infinitives

Everything in this article runs on the infinitive, so start there. Latin has six, three tenses in two voices, and every one of them is built from the principal parts you already know from the perfect tense article.

How each is made:

• Present active is the second principal part, sitting in the dictionary already: amare, videre, ducere, audire, capere.
• Present passive takes -ari, -eri, -iri in the first, second and fourth conjugations: amari, videri, audiri. The third conjugation drops the whole -ere for a bare -i: duci, mitti, capi, scribi. That third-conjugation form catches everyone out once, because it is so short it looks like a mistake.
• Perfect active is the perfect stem plus -isse: amavisse, dixisse, cepisse, fuisse, potuisse. No exceptions anywhere in the language.
• Perfect passive is the fourth principal part plus esse, and the participle agrees with its subject exactly as it does in the perfect passive tense: amatus esse, capta esse, visi esse.
• Future active is the -urus participle plus esse: amaturus esse, dicturus esse, venturus esse. Sum gives futurus esse, which has an older alternative, fore, used just as freely.
• Future passive is a supine plus iri: amatum iri. It is genuinely rare. Recognise it and move on.

Deponent verbs, which the passive article covers, have present infinitives that look passive and mean active: loqui (to speak), sequi (to follow), pati (to suffer), uti (to use), nasci (to be born). Their perfect infinitive is locutus esse, to have spoken.

The construction

Latin reports a statement by putting its subject into the accusative and its verb into the infinitive:

Dico regem venire.

Literally: I say the king to be coming.

I say that the king is coming.

Rex has become regem because it is now the object of the reporting verb, in a rough sense: the whole reported statement is what is being said. Anything completing that reported verb goes accusative as well, because it has to agree with an accusative subject:

Puto deum bonum esse. I think that God is good.

Scimus milites fortes esse. We know that the soldiers are brave.

Bonum and fortes are accusative, agreeing with deum and milites. This is ordinary adjective agreement doing its job; the adjectives article has the full machinery.

The trigger verbs are a fixed and learnable family:

Two notes on that table. Nego means deny, and Latin much prefers it to a negated dico: where English says he says that the king is not coming, Latin says negat regem venire, he denies that the king is coming. And inquam is not in the family at all: it introduces a direct quotation, dropped in after the first word or two of the quoted speech, and it takes no infinitive.

The tense of the infinitive is relative

This is the part worth slowing down for, because it is where most of the errors live.

A Latin infinitive does not tell you when something happened. It tells you when it happened relative to the reporting verb. Present means at the same time; perfect means before; future means after. Nothing else changes when you move the main verb around:

Read the left column again. The Latin is identical down each row. Only English moves. English has a rule that a past reporting verb drags the reported verb back a tense with it, and Latin has no such rule, because the infinitive was never marking absolute time in the first place.

So when you translate, do it in two steps. Work out the relationship from the infinitive, then choose the English tense that expresses that relationship given where the main verb sits. Trying to match a Latin infinitive to a single fixed English tense will fail on half the sentences you meet.

Esse is very often dropped, especially in the perfect and future:

Dixit urbem captam. He said the city had been captured.

Credo eum venturum. I believe he will come.

The participle alone carries it. Do not read captam as a stray adjective looking for a noun.

se: the reflexive subject

When the reported subject is the same person as the reporting subject, Latin uses se, the accusative of sui:

Rex dicit se venire. The king says that he, the king, is coming.

Rex dicit eum venire. The king says that he, some other man, is coming.

English cannot make that distinction without adding words. He says he is coming leaves you guessing; Latin has settled it before you get there. The same split runs through the possessives, suus for the main subject and eius for anybody else, which the pronouns article sets out in full.

Se has no number and no gender, so it covers he, she, it and they alike, though it does decline for case: sui, sibi, se, se. The participle that agrees with it is not:

Regina dixit se venturam esse. The queen said she would come.

Milites dixerunt se urbem cepisse. The soldiers said that they had taken the city.

Venturam is feminine singular for the queen. In the second sentence there is no participle to agree, so nothing shows the plural except milites and the sense.

Infinitives that are not indirect statement

Not every infinitive is reporting something. Two other uses turn up constantly and neither takes an accusative subject:

• Completing another verb. Venire possum, I can come. Rex venire vult, the king wants to come. Debemus manere, we ought to stay. The infinitive simply finishes off possum, volo, debeo, soleo, audeo, incipio. Same subject throughout, no accusative in sight.
• Acting as a noun. Errare humanum est, to err is human. The infinitive is the neuter subject of the sentence, which is why the adjective is neuter.

Iubeo sits between the two camps: iubet milites venire, he orders the soldiers to come. There is an accusative and an infinitive, but this is a command being given rather than a statement being reported, and the English keeps its to.

What to take away

• Six infinitives, built from the principal parts: amare, amari, amavisse, amatus esse, amaturus esse, amatum iri.
• Third-conjugation present passive is a bare -i: duci, capi, mitti.
• Latin has no word for that in reported speech. Accusative subject plus infinitive.
• The infinitive's tense is relative to the main verb: present for same time, perfect for earlier, future for later.
• The English tense shifts when the main verb is past. The Latin does not.
• Se for the main subject, eum or eam for anybody else.
• Esse is often left out. The participle still carries the tense.

Next: the participles those future and perfect infinitives are built out of, and how a single participle can swallow an entire subordinate clause.