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The three verbs from last episode

Operative, at the end of the last episode's GRAMMATICA you were told that three verbs want an infinitive beside them more than any others, and that they would get an episode of their own. This is that episode. The three are volō (I want), nōlō (I do not want), and possum (I am able).

Listen to what your Recentius heard in Septimus's tablīnum:

multa vōbīs dīcere volō.
nōlō vōs sine scientiā mittere.
illūc redīre nōn potestis.

Each one leans on an infinitive: dīcere, mittere, redīre. English does the same thing. I want is not a finished thought. I want to tell you many things is. The infinitive supplies what the first verb is missing, which is why it is called a complementary infinitive: it completes the verb it stands beside.

Where the infinitive sits

English puts the infinitive after: I want to speak. Latin usually puts it before: loquī volō. Sextus writes hoc scrībere nōlō, and Romulus, on a hill that is not yet Rome, thinks aliquis eum portāre dēbet. Read to the end of the clause before you decide what the sentence is doing. The verb running the whole thing is often the last word you reach.

volō, velle, voluī: to want

The endings are the familiar ones, -ō, -s, -t, -mus, -tis, -nt. What is irregular is the stem underneath them, which shifts between vol-, vīs, and vul-. Learn the six forms as six words rather than trying to derive them.

nōlō, nōlle, nōluī: to not want

This verb is nōn + volō squeezed together. Look at which forms squeezed and which did not. nōn + volō became nōlō, but nōn + vīs stayed nōn vīs, two separate words. Three forms fused and three did not, and the ones that did not are exactly the ones where volō had already gone irregular. Petulāns, up the tree, uses the fused form: nōlō vōbīscum loquī.

possum, posse, potuī: to be able

This one you can build yourself, and it is worth doing once. Take pot- and put the forms of sum behind it: pot + es = potes, pot + est = potest, pot + estis = potestis. Where sum begins with s, the t turns into s to match it: pot + sum = possum, pot + sumus = possumus, pot + sunt = possunt. You have known the forms of sum since Mission 1, so you already know most of this verb.

Same verb, two endings

Remus climbs onto the Lapis and shouts Ētrūriam vidēre possum. His brother has just warned him sī hostēs ad nōs festīnant, Lapidem vidēre possunt. It is the same verb both times. The ending is the only thing that tells you Remus is bragging about himself and Romulus is worried about the enemy. Get it wrong and you have the argument backwards.

nōlī and nōlīte

Septimus hands your Recentius a pīlula and says nōlīte timēre, "do not be afraid." That is nōlō giving a negative command, and an infinitive always follows it. You will see it often, usually from someone telling you not to do something. Read it as do not; the grammar behind it comes later.

All three in the past tense

You completed the perfect tense in 6.3, and these three verbs form it regularly off their third principal part. In KEY-TEXT B, Rōmulus frātrem suum adiuvāre voluit: he wanted to help his brother. Same endings you already know. Only the stems are new: volu-, nōlu-, potu-.

Other verbs that take an infinitive

These three are not the only ones, and you have been reading the others for missions without comment. dēbeō has been doing it since Mission 3: ad praetōrium īre dēbeō. KEY-TEXT B alone gives you condere urbem cōnstituērunt and urbem novam intrāre dēsīderāvērunt. When you meet an unfamiliar verb with a bare infinitive parked in front of it, this is very likely what is going on.

Video briefing from Latin Tutorial:

Conflicting reports

Operative, your Recentius has met the founding of Rome three separate ways, and they do not agree on some of the details.

In 7.1 you read Geminī, which took you from the fall of Troy down through Aeneas, Alba Longa, and the Silvian kings to Amulius and the twins. In this episode you read Rōmulus Remusque, which covers some of the same ground and then keeps going, through the killing of Amulius to the founding itself. And the immersion is about to put you on the hill while it happens, which means you will be able to check both of them against a third version.

Set the two readings beside each other and some of the details diverge. In Geminī the slaves ordered to kill the boys refuse, and the twins go into the river in a saccus. In Rōmulus Remusque there is a single slave, he obeys, and the boys go into an alveus that floats. One version has ordinary people quietly disobeying a king, and the other has a man doing what he is told and the river saving the babies anyway.

Interestingly enough, neither text is wrong. This is what a Roman origin story actually looked like: a set of competing versions, none of them official, but often all of them known.

Rome had two founders and accepted it

The larger problem is Aeneas. He escapes Troy carrying his father (and in the TSTT the Lapis), and Troy falls in roughly 1184 BCE by the counting that the Romans used. Romulus founds Rome in 753 BCE. That is a gap of more than four hundred years, and Rome cannot have been founded twice.

The fix is the Alban king list you read in Geminī: Ascanius founds Alba Longa, a line of kings rules there for centuries, and Rhea Silvia is a descendant. It is a bridge built to connect two stories that were originally separate.

Romans reconciled the two stories because Aeneas gave Rome a place in the Greek world's oldest story, which mattered enormously to Romans who felt culturally lesser to Greece. Romulus gave Rome the city itself, its walls, its Senate, its first citizens. One is prestige and the other is foundation.

They kept the murder in

Here is the part worth really exploring in greater detail. Romulus kills his brother in the very foundation story. This is an intentional decision that persists through retellings.

At any point, the Romans could have decided to reject this version of the story. Stories get cleaned up all the time, and there were versions available where Remus dies some other way, killed in the fighting or by one of Romulus's men rather than by Romulus himself. Those versions existed but they did not win out in terms of popularity.

What kept the fratricide at the core of the story was the wall. In Rōmulus Remusque, Remus jumps over the new wall to mock it, and Romulus kills him on the spot with a line about what happens to anyone who does that again. A Roman city wall was not only defensive. The pōmērium, the sacred boundary, was a religious object; crossing it improperly was a violation, and all armies (including Roman armies) were forbidden to carry weapons inside it. Working through that lens, Romulus is not a man losing his temper at his brother. He is the first person to enforce Roman law, and the penalty is death.

Romans also read their own history back into it. They fought civil war after civil war in the century before your Recentius was born. Looking at multiple wars where Romans were killing Romans, the poet Horace recalled Romulus and Remus and said the city had been founded in a brother's blood and had never stopped paying for it.

Which reading do you think a Roman in 81 CE would have preferred, the founder enforcing the boundary or the city cursed from the start? What in Rōmulus Remusque supports the one you chose?

Why the year matters

Look at the dates in the informational text: annō 796 AUC (43 CE). AUC is ab urbe conditā, "from the founding of the city." Romans counted their years forward from the morning on that hill.

The Romans were not certain of that date either. Serious writers put the founding at 814, at 748, at 728. The one that won, 753 BCE, became standard mostly because it was the one the most respected authorities used. Once it was fixed, Rome celebrated the city's birthday every year on the twenty-first of April, at the festival of the Parilia.

Why any of this reaches Britannia

Your Recentius is taking part in a story about a hill in Italy while sitting in a villa on a cold island at the far edge of the empire, in a province that has existed for less than forty years.

That is by design. The founding stories, along with many others, travelled with the army. When Rome planted a colony of retired soldiers at Camulodunum, those men brought Roman law, Roman gods, and Roman time, and they dated their documents ab urbe conditā like everyone else. Becoming Roman meant, among other things, agreeing to start counting from 753 BCE.

Septimus's villa is part of that tradition. So is the fact that a vīlicus in a British field expects to be understood when he demands proof of citizenship.

Look at the informational text and name one thing the Romans built in Britain in the years after the conquest that would have made the province feel like Rome to a soldier stationed there. What does your answer suggest Rome thought it was exporting?