Please make your selection from the above CODEX menu options for Episode 7.1

The infinitive

Operative, you have met these forms since Mission 1 without being told what they were. Petulāns says he wants fugere, to flee. Adrogāns tells him he must redīre, to return. In the key-text, Marcus writes that he must invenīre the Recentiī.

Each of those is an infinitive. English builds it with a separate little word, to: to flee, to return, to find. Latin builds the meaning into an ending instead, and the ending is usually -re. The infinitive names the action and nothing else: no person doing it, no tense placing it in time. fugere is simply "to flee." That is why it is called the infinitive: unlike fugit or fugiēbat, it is not tied down to a person or a time.

Where to find it: the dictionary

Open any dictionary entry and the infinitive sits in the second slot:

amō, amāre, amāvī

You already know the third slot: the perfect stem from 6.3. The three forms in a dictionary entry are the verb's principal parts. The second principal part is the present infinitive, and it is the most useful form in the entry, because the vowel before -re tells you which family the verb belongs to:

Second and third differ only by a macron: habēre with a long ē is second, dūcere with a short e is third. (Most textbooks call these families conjugations. Same four groups, more formal name; know the word so it does not surprise you when you meet it elsewhere.)

One trap inside the third family: a few verbs, like capiō, faciō, and fugiō, end in -iō in the first slot and look fourth-family at a glance. The second slot settles it: capere has a short e, so capiō belongs to the third. When you look up an unfamiliar verb, the infinitive is how you get from the form on the page to the form in the dictionary.

For a closer look at the four verb families and their infinitives, view this briefing from latintutorial.com.

A few that do not end in -re

A handful of very common verbs refuse the pattern. Recognize them; do not try to build them:

Two are standing in the key-text: Marcus must go, ad praetōrium īre dēbeō, and the Recentiī cannot escape, effugere nōn possunt.

(A pairing to notice and read past: most infinitives above lean on another verb, as in "he wants to flee." The three verbs that do this most, volō, nōlō, and possum, get the whole of Episode 7.2.)

Before moving on, operatives should view this second briefing on the infinitive from latintutorial.com.

The iron collar

Operative, there is a man in a tree with a ring of iron around his neck, and the iron is the thing to look at, not his face.

The collar is not there to stop him from running. He ran anyway; iron around a neck stops nobody. Its job is to tell every stranger who sees him what he is: an enslaved man who has run away, and a reward for whoever returns him. Some surviving collars carry a bronze tag with the message spelled out, along the lines of hold me, I have run away, and return me to my master, with an address.

Look at what that little object expects. It expects a stranger to find the runaway. It expects the stranger to help. It expects a working system for returning a person to an owner who might live a hundred miles away. Slavery in the Roman world was not one cruel man; it was a system that ordinary free people kept running every time they read a tag. Your informational text dē servitūte Rōmānā gives you the rest of the system; read it with the collar in mind.

Adrogāns

The man who caught the runaway is worth a careful look, because he is almost certainly a slave himself.

Adrogāns is a vīlicus, the manager of Salvius's whole estate. He gives orders, keeps the accounts, holds the keys. Roman owners very often chose an enslaved man for this job. Why would an enslaved man do it? Because the system paid him in hope. An enslaved person could save up a fund called a pecūlium and might one day buy freedom with it. A capable man could rise to vīlicus. A loyal one might be freed in the master's will. Every one of those hopes belonged to individuals, one at a time, and each one gave a person a reason to work the system rather than fight it. When Adrogāns catches Petulāns, the system is working the way it was built to work.

Proving you are free

Adrogāns can say to your team, vōs quoque servī estis, ut putō: "you are slaves too, I think." He can say it to anyone, because in a Roman street nothing showed. Enslaved people wore no uniform and carried no mark; the collar marked Petulāns only because he had already run.

So how did a free Roman prove it? Not by appearance. By the tria nōmina, by the protection of lēx, and above all by a testis, a witness whose word carried weight. Status was something other people vouched for. Your prompt will ask you to answer Adrogāns exactly this way, so as you read dē servitūte Rōmānā, gather your proof: which details in that text would a Roman accept as evidence that a person is free?