Telling apart Dative and Ablative plural, part 3

I got long winded last time. This should be shorter. The reason is that Ablative case is much more common than Dative case. In fact, it will show up about six times for every use of the Dative. It is almost safe to guess that an ambiguous form is Ablative unless it meets one of the conditions outlined in the previous entry. That said, I will help clarify situations where you are most certainly seeing the Ablative case. There will of course be other uses of the Ablative, but always let context be your guide in sorting Dative from Ablative. On to the obvious culprits.

1. Prepositions

Let's get this out of the way first. It's easy and a dead give away.

Karthago a Romanis deleta est.

The sentence, save “a Romanis” means “Carthage was destroyed.” The preposition “a” is a dead giveaway for what's coming next. Even the most beginning student of Latin should be thinking that an Ablative object will be coming after the preposition. “By the Romans.” There's our answer.

2. PUFFV verbs

The name sounds funny, but the verbs in this group take an Ablative compliment—fancy talk for it's-a-direct-object-in-English-but-not-Latin. These verbs are: potior, utor, fruor, fungor and vescor. Most beginning students won't see these, but they're common enough to merit high placement.

Romani provinciis potiebantur.

Again, pretty straightforward. “The Romans were taking possession…” But of what? The question screams out at us. Once we see the verb “potiebantur,” we are tipped off that the ambiguous form of “provinciis” is indeed Ablative. So we have “The Romans were taking possession of the provinces.”

3. Ablative Absolute

Everybody's favorite use of the Ablative. What? You don't have one? Oh. I thought everyone did. What makes this so easy to recognize is that it is usually a noun plus a participle in the Ablative case. There are a few other uses that don't include a participle that are easy to recgonize—“duce” and “consule” come to mind. Which leads to our example:

Cicerone et Hybrida consulibus, Catalina respublicam Romanam capere voluit.

Ok, so the “Cicerone et Hybrida” followed by “consulibus” is huge help in telling what's going on here. We have one unambiguously Ablative name joined to another not-so-unambiguously Ablative name followed by an ambiguous Dative/Ablative. The “et” sets the two consuls on equal footing case-wise and the “consulibus” must thus agree with that. So that part might translate, “When Cicero and Hybrida were consuls…” Let's try another.

Conuriationibus ruptis, Catalina ex urbe fugere temptavit.

Here the form is more ambiguous, but the noun/participle pairing should clue us in that we have an Ablative absolute on our hands. “With the conspiracies broken, Cataline tried to flee from the city.”

4. Comparatives

This is the last major tip off that you've got Ablative rather than Dative.

Maior natu fratribus sum.

This is actually pretty easy. As soon as you see the comparative form of “maior” you need to immediately start looking for either “quam” + another nominative or an Ablative noun to show what is “minor.” So, “Maior natu sum,” is pretty easy to deal with. “I am older by birth.” Again, notice that we want to know the answer to “older than whom?” So often the way we think pulls us along to find obvious answers. In this case—pun intended—“fratribus” is the only word that's an obvious answer, but it also falls into the correct case to be grammatically correct. “I am older (by birth) than my brothers.”

Next week: a short quiz to see how well you get it.

This work by Peter Sipes is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 United States License.