The perfect active

The perfect active tense

The form of a finite verb in Latin expresses the subject as well as the verb: it is a complete verbal unit by itself. Example: the form venit means “he came, arrived” or “she came, arrived”; the form venērunt means “they came, arrived.” These are already complete sentences that do not need a separate word for “he,” “she” or “they.”

The indicative mood and narrating events in the past

As already described above, finite verbs have five properties: person, number, tense, mood, and voice.

The indicative is one of the three moods of the Latin verb. It is the mode of verb used for narrating factual events, and for that reason is frequently seen in most texts.

Latin has more than one tense for narrating events in the past, but they differ in aspect — that is, how to think of or picture the action the verb is representing.

the perfect tense expresses an action as single and simple or complete, without indication of its continuation
the imperfect tense expresses an action as continuous, started, ongoing, habitual or in any way incomplete

The choice of verb tense, then, involves not only an indication that the events happened in the past, but other information about the event. Do you want to emphasize it as a single incident? Choose the perfect indicative if so. Or do you want to indicate that it happened over a length of time, was repeated or habitual, perhaps was started but not completed? The imperfect indicative will give you the means to add those shades of meaning.

Meaning of the perfect indicative

The perfect indicative represents the action as single, simple, distinct, the equivalent of a snapshot of the action. The tense that is the closest to this idea in English is the “simple past,” the past tense formed in the active voice by adding -ed to the verb stem, or made by changes to the stem, with no other “helping” verbs. Examples of the “simple past” in the active voice: “He walked,” “she ran,” “they watched,” “she taught,” “they learned.”

The perfect in Latin might also indicate the completion of the action, as the English perfect does: “he has walked,” “she has run,” “they have watched,” “she has taught,” “they have learned.” That aspect emphasizes the resulting present state of being from the completion of the action in the past.

To understand a verb form, you must take into account all five properties: person, number, tense, mood and voice. In the active voice, the subject performs the action. In the passive voice, the subject receives the action.

To form finite verbs in the perfect tense and active voice, you will use the third principal part. Remember that this part is already an indicative form of the perfect active, namely the first person singular. When you see a vocabulary listing like this:

veniō, venīre, vēnī, ventus, "to come"

you know that vēnī means “I came.”

Forming and analyzing the perfect active

The general pattern you’ll follow for forming inflected words is:

find the correct stem
apply the correct ending

The stem dictates what possible tenses and voices can be formed; the ending identifies the person, number and mood.

The third principal part is used for all forms of the perfect active. To find its stem, drop the final -i. For venio, then:

(1) veni -> ven-

Let’s express “They arrived,” a complete sentence in the indicative mood. We to add the ending that expresses the third plural of the indicative, which is -ērunt

(2) ven + ērunt -> venērunt

Voilà! You’ve just expressed the English idea “They arrived.” with the complete Latin sentence venērunt.

To analyze a Latin verb form, you can mentally reverse the process: if you isolate what ending is used with what stem, you can identify the form. When you see venērunt in a text, you can tell yourself that since -ērunt is the third plural.

All four conjugations work exactly the same way and use exactly the same endings for the perfect active indicative. Memorize this pair of endings:

Person	Singular	Plural
Third	-it	ērunt

Here is a complete example with translation using the verb fugiō, fugĕre, fūgī, fugitus - “to flee.”

Person	Singular	Plural
Third	fugit, “he, she fled”	fugērunt, “they fled”