Verbs and syntax IX: ablative absolute

• The ablative absolute is the Rolls-Royce of Latin constructions: it's elegant, it's powerful, it's classy, and it's not really English. It's so called because it sticks in the ablative any words that are absolutely detached from the rest of the sentence.

• The basic types
  • There are five main kinds of ablative absolute:
    

  • Remember that there's no present participle of sum (equivalent to the English "being") - no such word as *essens, *essentis. You get round this by allowing omission of sum in ablative absolutes just as it's permitted in indicative clauses. In the last two cases, as the first alternative translation for each shows, what you've effectively got is an ablative absolute with omission of present participle of sum. There isn't a perfect participle *futus, -a, -um either, for the simple reason that perfect participles are passive and you can't (in any language) have a passive of the verb "to be". (You can rephrase "I love my dog" as "My dog is loved by me", but you can't rephrase "I am happy" as "happy is being been by me".) But because sum does have a future participle futurus, -a, -um, you can say things like Caesare futuro duce ("With Caesar about to be leader", "Because/When Caesar was going to be leader", etc.).

• Translating it
  • Contrary to what the book says, the ablative absolute is consistently translatable, though it won't always sound very idiomatic in English: you can (nearly) always just translate it as an ordinary ablative with "with" (as opposed to "by", "from", and "in"). But most of the time it'll be better English to paraphrase it with a quite different finite-verb construction using a conjunction like "when", "because", "since", etc. See the examples in the right-hand column above.