-s

Operative, you may have noticed that every verb you have met so far has been a third-person verb: it tells what he or she or it does, like Marcus sedet, "Marcus sits." You have now met a verb of a different kind. When Sextus asks you quaestiōnēsne habēs?, "do you have questions?", the ending -s on habēs tells you the subject is you. (You meet the same ending in the VERBA entry quid agis?, "what are you doing?")

This is worth pausing on. In English we need a separate word, "you," to name who is acting. Latin can carry that information inside the verb itself: habēs already means "you have," with no other word required. The ending does the work the English pronoun does.

 

-ō

Now meet the speaker's own ending. When Sextus says volūmen dēsīderō, "I want the scroll," the ending -ō tells you the subject is I. So a single Latin verb can name three different people by its ending alone:

• parāt, "he/she prepares" (the -t you already know)
• parās, "you prepare" (the new -s)
• parō, "I prepare" (the new -ō)

The Demiurge offers one scene to fix the difference. Picture the same dinner described by three speakers:

• Caecilius, of the cook: coquus cēnam parāt. "The cook prepares dinner."
• Caecilius, to the cook: tū cēnam parās. "You prepare dinner."
• the cook, of himself: ego cēnam parō. "I prepare dinner."

You will sometimes see the little words ego ("I") and tū ("you") standing beside these verbs, as in ego cēnam parō. Because the ending already names the person, Latin does not need them; a writer adds them only for emphasis, much as you might lean on the word in "I prepare dinner." These are the personal pronouns in the nominative, the case of the subject.

You have also met this pronoun "you" doing other jobs, where it changes shape: in Sextus tē spectat, "Sextus watches you," the form tē is "you" as the object. For now it is enough to recognize tē (and tibi, "to you") as the same pronoun in a different role. You are not asked to produce these forms yet.

For a fuller view of the singular present endings, review this video briefing from latintutorial.com:

Patronage and the Making of Roman Literature

Operative, you have just read of a man, Gāius Cilnius Maecēnās, who gave money to poets. That was not simply private generosity. It was one of the central institutions of Roman society, and grasping it will sharpen every literary mission ahead of you.

Romans organized much of their social and political life around the bond between a patrōnus (patron) and his clientēs (clients, dependents). A patron was a man of wealth and standing who offered protection, money, legal help, and influence; in return his clients gave him their loyalty, their public support, and the visible prestige of a large following. The bond ran in both directions and carried real obligations on each side. You will see how it was enacted, day by day, inside a great house when you go deeper into one; for now, hold on to the idea of the exchange.

When that same bond was turned toward the arts, it produced what we call literary patronage. A poet in Rome could rarely live by selling his work: there was no system of royalties, and every copy was written out slowly by hand. A poet needed a patron to house him, feed him, and free him to write. In exchange, the patron's name lived on inside the poetry, and his reputation rose with the poet's fame.

This is why the name Maecēnās still means "a generous patron of the arts" two thousand years later. The poets of his circle, above all Vergil and Horace, composed some of the most admired Latin ever written, and they composed it with his support. Much of the literature you will study in this operation survives because a patron once judged it worth paying for. When you handle a volūmen written in such a circle, you hold the product of this exchange.

You may wish to consider this short documentary courtesy of Kings and Generals on YouTube about Roman patronage:

For how such a scroll was actually made and written, see the informational text on Roman writing materials.