Latin Participles: amans, amatus, amaturus
A participle is a verb wearing an adjective's clothes. It has a tense and a voice like a verb, and it agrees in case, number and gender like an adjective. That double life is what makes it so useful, and so easy to misread.
The three participles
| Participle | Form | Meaning | Declines like |
|---|---|---|---|
| Present active | , amantis | loving | (third decl.) |
| Perfect passive | amatus, amata, amatum | having been loved | , , |
| Future active | amaturus, amatura, amaturum | about to love | , , |
Present active. Take the present stem and add -ns, with a genitive in -ntis. First and second conjugations give / amantis and videns / videntis. Third and fourth insert an -e-: / ducentis, capiens / capientis, / audientis. It declines as a one-ending third-declension adjective, so the accusative is amantem, the plural amantes, the neuter plural amantia. The third-declension article has the pattern in full.
There is one small wrinkle worth knowing. The ablative singular is -e when the word is behaving as a genuine participle (a amante, by the king who is loving) and -i when it has hardened into a plain adjective (amanti , with a loving heart). Nobody will misunderstand you if you get it wrong.
Perfect passive. This is the fourth principal part, which you already learned as part of the perfect passive tense: amatus, dictus, , visus, , auditus, scriptus, gestus. It takes first and second declension adjective endings, so it has a form for every case, number and gender.
Future active. Take the same stem and add -urus: amaturus, , capturus, venturus. gives futurus, which is where the English word future comes from. gives moriturus, which is where the gladiators' morituri salutant comes from, and gives the slightly odd iturus.
There is a fourth form, amandus, the gerundive: technically a future passive participle meaning needing to be loved. It behaves differently enough from the other three that it deserves its own treatment rather than a fourth column here.
The gap in the middle
Look at that table again and notice what is not in it. There is no present passive participle, so Latin has no single word for being loved. And there is no perfect active participle for ordinary verbs, so Latin has no word for having loved.
That second gap matters far more than the first, because English uses the perfect active participle constantly. Having seen the city, he turned back. Having said this, she left. Latin cannot do it. It restructures instead, most often with a clause, sometimes with two coordinate verbs, and sometimes with the construction we will come to at the end of this article.
The practical consequence is a translation rule you should hold firmly:
is the king having been captured.It is never the king having captured.
Every perfect participle you meet on an ordinary verb is passive. If the noun looks like the doer rather than the sufferer, you have misread something.
Deponent verbs are the exception, and they are the exception that gets used. Because deponents carry passive forms with active meanings, their perfect participles are active:
| Deponent | Perfect participle | Meaning |
|---|---|---|
| having spoken | ||
| having followed | ||
| having suffered | ||
| having set out | ||
| having been born | ||
| having used |
These are gold, because they are the only participles in the language that let a Latin writer say having done X. Expect to see far more of them per page than their raw frequency would predict.
A participle is a compressed clause
Here is the habit that turns participles from a parsing exercise into reading fluency. A participle is a subordinate clause folded into a single word. To read it, unfold it.
Milites victi fugerunt.
Word for word: the soldiers, having been defeated, fled. That is comprehensible and it is bad English. What the sentence actually says is:
The soldiers fled because they had been defeated.
The participle carries no conjunction, so Latin is silent about the relationship between the two events. English cannot stay silent for long. Choosing the conjunction is therefore an act of interpretation, and you should make it deliberately:
| Relationship | Example | English |
|---|---|---|
| Time | videns . | When the king saw the city, he gave the signal. |
| Cause | victi . | The soldiers fled because they had been defeated. |
| Concession | vulneratus pugnavit. | Although wounded, the man fought on. |
| Description | a dicta audiverunt. | Everyone heard the words which the king spoke. |
That last row is the quiet one. A participle sitting tight against its noun is often just describing it, and unfolds into a relative clause rather than an adverbial one. currens is running water; audientes are the people who are listening.
The signposts help. A in the main clause usually means the participle was concessive. A or usually means it was temporal. A participle standing next to its noun with nothing between them is usually descriptive.
Tense is relative, again
The participle's tense measures against the main verb, not against now. This is the same rule the infinitives article gives for indirect statement, and it is genuinely the same rule rather than a second one to memorise:
- Present participle: at the same time as the main verb.
moriens, the king spoke as he was dying. - Perfect participle: before the main verb.
- Future participle: after the main verb.
morituri salutant, the soldiers who are about to die greet the king.
So a present participle in a sentence with a past main verb translates as a past in English. Videns in videns is seeing in form and when he saw in sense.
Participles standing alone
Strip the noun away and a participle becomes one, exactly as any Latin adjective does:
- the dead
dicta- the things said, sayings
- all the things done, all deeds
gestae, things done, is the noun phrase Augustus used for the account of his own achievements.
What we are deliberately not covering yet
There is one more thing a participle does, and it is the single most characteristic construction in Latin prose. When the participle and its noun have no grammatical connection to the rest of the sentence, Latin puts both into the ablative and detaches the whole phrase:
Urbe capta, milites redierunt.
The city having been captured, the soldiers returned.
That is the ablative absolute, and it is Latin's main workaround for the missing perfect active participle. It has its own article in chapter 10, because it needs the full ablative apparatus and a proper look at how to translate it into English that a human would write. For now, recognise the shape: a noun in the ablative, a participle in the ablative agreeing with it, and no other role in the sentence.
What to take away
- Three participles: present active
, perfect passiveamatus, future activeamaturus. declines like;amatusandamaturuslike.- No present passive participle, and no perfect active participle except on deponents.
means having been captured, never having captured. Get this one wrong and the sentence inverts.- Deponent perfect participles are active and are used heavily for exactly that reason.
- Tense is relative to the main verb: present for same time, perfect for earlier, future for later.
- Unfold a participle into a when-, because-, although- or who-clause. Do not leave a literal having been done in your English.
- Two ablatives with no other job in the sentence is the ablative absolute, coming in chapter 10.