Latin Study Guide Stage 9 | Amherst College

University:
Amherst College
Course:
CLAS 111 | An Introduction to Latin Language and Literature
Academic year:

2021
Views:

239

Pages:

2
Author:

Carissa Thomas

Stage 9: Vocabulary: Grammar – The Dative Case In English, we have sentences like this “Clemens was offering wine to the girl”. How would we describe the girl in this sentence? The grammatical function of this is the indirect object. This brings up another question, how do we express indirect objects in Latin? So in Latin, we use another case to express indirect objects. There’s a jingle stuck in my head that tells me what the Dative Case is used for. “Verbs that give, say, show, or tell, ring the dative bell!”. This is everything that an indirect object can be. For the first declension, singular dative ends in -ae and the plural dative ends in -is. For the second declension, the singular dative ends in -o and the plural dative ends in -is. For the third declension, the singular is -i and the plural is -ibus. The dative case is not changed by gender for any of the declensions. Ex: The sentence “Clemens puellae vinum offerebat” would be “Clemens would be offering wine to the girl. Culture – The Baths Earlier in this guide, we went over the first half of the day for a Roman citizen. One of the activities that a Roman citizen would do in the second half of the day would be to go to the baths. In Rome, people didn’t have baths in their home but rather went to shared baths (I know it’s weird but that was the norm at the time). The first thing that would happen was that he would pay a small admission fee to enter the bath. After this, they would go to the palestra. The palestra was an area where people would greet each other and do common exercises such as wrestling and fencing. After the palestra, they would go to the apodyterium where they would undress and prepare to go to the baths. They would pass through a room similar to a sauna after they undressed. They would then enter the baths. At the bath, they would first go into hot water and they would have a slave massage them and clean them with olive oil (they didn’t have soap). After that, they would take a bath in the cold water and then they would redress and leave the baths. A diagram showing how a Roman bath would look like.