The perfect passive
Meaning of the perfect passive
In the passive voice, the subject of the verb is not the person or thing performing the action, but the one receiving it. The sentence “As a baby, Hercules killed two serpents with his hands” is in the active voice. “Hercules” is the subject; the verb, “killed,” is in the active voice, and “two serpents” is the direct object of the erb. In the active voice, the direct object is what receives the action.
But we could turn this around. “Two serpents were killed by Hercules” is in the passive voice. The grammatical subject is “two serpents,” but the serpents are not performing the action of killing: they’re receiving it. The two sentences mean approximately the same thing (although they put a slightly different emphasis on what’s important about the statement).
For both sentences, Latin will use a perfect tense, since the action of killing the serpents was a single, completed, one-time act. Hyginus uses the verb neco, a regular first-conjugation verb (so its principal parts are neco, necāre, necaui, necatus). If we want to tell the story in the active voice, Hercules will be the subject, so we would use the third person singular form, necauit.
But what if we wanted to turn it around, to make the serpents the subject of a passive verb, “the serpents were killed”? Let’s look at how to form the perfect passive.
Formation of the perfect passive
In the perfect tense, the passive voice forms are compound forms. They use a form the verb “to be” together with a form of the fourth principal part, which (as we’ll learn in detail in unit 4) is a participle. This is actually quite similar to the way English forms the past tense in the passive: the sentence “the serpents were killed” uses a form of the form “to be” plus a participle, “killed,” to express a passive voice action in the past. Latin uses present tense forms of “to be,” however. You’ll need to memorize these two forms:
| Person | Singular | Plural |
|---|---|---|
| Third | est | sunt |
The fourth principal part of neco is necatus, and used together with the verb “to be” creates a perfect passive form: necatus est means, “He was killed.”
The participle changes form its depending on the subject of the sentence, by applying different endings to the stem of the fourth part. We’ll learn more about grammatical gender later in this chapter, but for now, let’s note that the distinct forms of the fourth principal part will tell us the gender of the subject, and will match the number of the verb.
To find the stem of the fourth part, drop -us.
(1) necatus -> necat-
Then apply one of these endings:
| Gender | Singular | Plural |
|---|---|---|
| Masculine | -us | -i |
| Feminine | -a | -ae |
| Neuter | -um | -a |
We’ll consider the serpents to be masculine, and we know we have more than one of them, so we’ll use the ending -i.
(2) necat- + -i -> necati
Our form of “to be” will also be plural, to match the number of serpents, so our final statement will be necati sunt.
This is actually a complete sentence in Latin: “they (masculine) were killed.” Notice that it is possible to make a statement in the passive voice without indicating who did the action. This use of the passive is much beloved by people who want to avoid taking responsibility. (Consider an English sentence like, “Mistakes were made.”)
- use 4th principal part, adjective. Will look more at adjectives in this chapter, but note:
- gender, number in a subject form (nominative case)
- agreement among 4th part, sum and expressed or implied subject
- memorize endings:
Examples from Hyginus