The Latin Passive and Deponent Verbs: amatur, locutus sum

English builds a passive out of spare parts: a form of to be, plus a participle. He sees becomes he is seen. Latin does it with an ending, and then, halfway through the verb, changes its mind and does it the English way instead.

That inconsistency is the whole difficulty. Learn it as two systems and it is straightforward.

System one: the present, imperfect and future

Take the active personal endings you already know and swap them for these:

Five of the six are the active ending with a passive marker welded on. -Mini is the one that refuses to play along, and there is no trick for it; learn it separately.

Present passive across the four conjugations:

The imperfect and future do exactly what you would hope. Imperfect keeps its -ba-: amabar, amabaris, amabatur, amabamur, amabamini, amabantur. Future keeps its marker: amabor, amaberis, amabitur, and for third and fourth conjugation ducar, duceris, ducetur.

Two traps, both worth flagging now:

• Duceris is present passive and future passive at once. The vowels differ in length, and this course writes Latin without macrons, exactly as an inscription or a manuscript does. Context settles it, and you will be fine.
• -Re turns up instead of -ris. Cicero and the poets write amare for amaris. So amare is either the infinitive to love or the second person passive you are loved, and only the sentence tells you which.

While we are here: videor, the passive of video, has drifted. It means I seem far more often than I am seen, and the dictionary entry in this course says so. Videtur is one of the commonest words in Latin prose.

System two: the perfect, pluperfect and future perfect

Latin gives up on endings here and builds the passive out of two words, like English does.

The first is the perfect passive participle, which is the fourth principal part your dictionary has been quietly giving you all along: dico, dicere, dixi, dictum. Chop off the -um and you have an adjective meaning having been said. It declines like bonus, so it agrees with the subject in case, number and gender.

The second is a form of sum.

Read that table twice, because it contains the mistake almost everyone makes. Amatus est is past. The present tense of sum does not make the sentence present, because the participle has already finished the action. Amatus est is he was loved. Shift the English one step back from whatever sum looks like it is saying.

The agreement is real, not decorative:

Urbs ab hostibus capta est. The city was captured by the enemy.

Verba a rege dicta sunt. The words were said by the king.

Bellum gestum erat. The war had been waged.

Capta is feminine because urbs is; dicta is neuter plural because verba is; gestum is neuter singular because bellum is. Get the agreement wrong and a reader loses track of which noun the participle belongs to.

Participles worth knowing on sight, from verbs in this course: dico gives dictus, facio gives factus, mitto gives missus, capio gives captus, video gives visus, duco gives ductus, scribo gives scriptus, vinco gives victus, pono gives positus, gero gives gestus, relinquo gives relictus, do gives datus.

Who did it: agent versus instrument

English says by for both the person and the thing. Latin splits them, and this is one of the tidiest rules in the language.

• A person: a or ab plus the ablative. A rege victi sumus, we were beaten by the king. Ab hostibus capta est, she was captured by the enemy.
• A thing: bare ablative, no preposition. Gladio victus est, he was beaten by a sword. Aqua deletum est, it was destroyed by water.

Ab before a vowel or h, a before a consonant, on the same instinct as English a and an. If you are unsure whether a noun counts as a person, ask whether it could have chosen to act. Armies and gods count. Swords and rivers do not.

Deponent verbs: passive shape, active meaning

Now the good part. A sizeable group of Latin verbs has only passive forms and means something entirely active. They are called deponent because they have laid aside their active forms, which is a name that explains nothing and is what everyone calls them anyway.

Three principal parts, not four, because there is no separate passive to list.

Everything you just learned applies unchanged to the forms, and nothing applies to the meaning:

Rex loquitur. The king speaks. (Not: the king is spoken.)

Milites ducem secuti sunt. The soldiers followed the leader.

Homo moritur. The man is dying.

Sol oritur. The sun rises.

Note the second one: ducem is an ordinary accusative direct object. Deponents are transitive verbs wearing the wrong coat. Their perfect participle is active too, so locutus means having spoken, not having been spoken, and profectus means having set out.

Utor is the famous exception on top of the exception: it takes an ablative rather than an accusative. Gladio utitur, he uses a sword.

Why do deponents exist at all? They are the wreckage of an older middle voice, a third option between active and passive for actions you do to or for yourself. Sequor was something like I move myself after, morior I bring myself to an end. That origin is genuinely useful for making peace with the class, and useless for reading a sentence. The reading rule is blunter: if a passive-looking form cannot possibly mean a passive, it is a deponent. Nobody is being died at.

One last member of this family, going the other way. Facio has no ordinary present passive; fio fills the slot with active-looking endings and passive meaning. Fit is it is made, it becomes, it happens. The perfect reverts to type: factus sum.

What to take away

• Present, imperfect and future passive: -r, -ris, -tur, -mur, -mini, -ntur.
• Perfect, pluperfect and future perfect passive: fourth principal part plus sum, and the participle agrees with the subject.
• Amatus est is he was loved. Always shift back a tense.
• A or ab plus ablative for a person, bare ablative for a thing.
• Deponents look passive and mean active, take direct objects, and are cited with three principal parts.
• A passive form with no possible passive sense is a deponent. That test is faster than any list.