Participles: The Past Participle

Latin has three participles:

The Present Participle —(active)
The Past Participle — (PASSIVE)
The Future Participle — (active)

This page will tell you about the Past Participle.

The Past Participle is very common but remember that it is passive.
This past participle is derived from the supine of the verb by transforming it into an adjective as follows:

Here are the principal parts of the verb neco = kill:
neco, necare, necavi, necatum

The supine "necatum" gives us the past participle necatus, -a, -um which behaves like an adjective of the 1st/2nd declension like bonus, -a, -um
necatus, -a, -um literally means "having been killed" i.e. it is passive.

Exercise 2. Make the past participle of each of the following verbs and translate it.

1. do, dare, dedi, datum = give
2. mitto, mittere, misi, missum = send
3. expello, expellere, expuli, expulsum = drive out
4. scribo, scribere, scripsi, scriptum = write
5. deleo, delere, delevi, deletum = detroy

Check your answers here.

Past Participles are very useful for replacing whole clauses in Latin; they can be translated in a variety of ways into English: e.g.

milites servos captos necaverunt. could be translated as:

1. The soldiers killed the captured slaves.
2. The soldiers captured the slaves and killed them.
3. The soldiers killed the slaves after they had been captured.
4. the soldiers killed the slaves who had been captured.
   

Exercise 3. Here are some sentences containing past participles; see if you can translate them with the help of the wordlist.
When you have finished click here for the correct translation. Remember that there are several ways of translating sentences with past participles.

1. Julia epistolam a marito scriptam legit.
2. cives corpora militum caesorum magna cum dignitate sepeliverunt.
3. hi homines, ex urbe expulsi, exercitum latronum furumque composuerunt.
4. Adonis, verre vulneratus, mortuus est.
5. barbari urbes captas incenderunt.
6. latrones pecuniam in cista celatam invenerunt.
7. illam partem urbis incendio deletam Nero comparavit.
8. corpora horum servorum leonibus oppugnatorum alii servi removerunt.