Ablatives Unravelled: Agent and Instrument
How ablatives add interest to a sentence
For the first post of February, I'm going to be talking about ablatives again, specifically the ablative of agent and the ablative of instrument. If you missed my post for the January Latin Challenge Day 8: The Most Interesting Case: Announcing the Ablative, you can find it here.
Now, because this is about ablatives, I am obviously going to be needing the ablative case a lot, so if you're not sure about that ending or any of your noun endings, go and download my free guide to noun endings from here. Have it to hand as we go through this, or for whenever you need help with noun endings.
Really quick recap
Ablatives are usually translated using by, with, from, and sometimes in. Now the ablative of agent and the ablative of instrument are slightly different uses of the ablative.
Chances are you've already been translating these things, as they often come alongside the more normal uses we talked about yesterday. This explanation is so you understand the grammar that you might need to know which type of ablative you are translating.
Ablative of Agent
This is used with passive verbs, usually, and it has an a or an ab preposition. For example:
mercator ab uxore necatur.
The merchant is killed by his wife.
mercator is a nominative, the merchant is in charge of the sentence. necatur is a 3rd person passive verb - we will look at these in detail later in the January Latin Challenge, but for now it means is being killed. uxore is the ablative. Just before it is ab preposition. The merchant is killed by his wife. It's not a very happy sentence, but it does get the ablative of agent.
How do I know if it’s a or ab?
The difference between a and ab:
a is if the word following it begins with a consonant
ab is if it begins with a vowel.
It’s nice and easy, but just keep in mind that it could be either. In this case it's ab because I have uxore which starts with a vowel.
She is actually the person doing the verb, but because it's passive, she is not the nominative of the sentence. The merchant is the nominative. He is the subject of the passive verb. She is the agent who is doing it.
Ablative of instrument
The ablative of agent is used with active, passive, or deponent verbs. It really doesn't matter what type of verb you have, you could have an ablative of instrument.
You also don't need a preposition. In this case, the preposition is included within the ablative itself.
servus dominum gladio oppugnat.
The slave attacks the master with a sword.
gladio is my ablative of instrument. I don't have a preposition before it.
Hang on a minute
Now you might just be thinking, “well, that's just my usual ablative!”, and you'd be right, often this can be your normal ablative. So really this is just a fancy name for something you have been doing for ages! One fewer thing to learn! Hurray!
The only thing you need to know is that it is literally “an instrument by which something happens”.
So why does this matter?
Sometimes you can have sentences that have an agent and an instrument. This is where it becomes really important that you understand which is which.
rex a militibus veneno occisus est.
The eagle eyed among you will notice we have two ablatives in this sentence. We're going to break it down a bit beforehand, but keep an eye on those ablatives because we don't want them to trip us up.
We're going to start with the nominative rex, “the king”
Then I find my verb, “was killed”, occisus est. This is a passive, so now I know that I might be able to have an ablative of agent here, so I'm going to be looking for a or ab.
I have a militibus. This is my ablative of agent. “By the soldiers”. They're the ones who are doing the killing.
Now I'm going to find my ablative of instrument: veneno, “with poison”. You could say “by poison” or “by means of poison”, that's really what the ablative of instrument means, but that's kind of clunky to say. So we usually just say “with”.
“The king was killed by the soldiers with poison”
poculum ab ancilla, vino expletum est.
To start, find the nominative and the verb: “the cup”: poculum, “was filled”: expletum est
In this case, I've got ab ancilla. Again, I've got the preposition with the -b on the end, because ancilla starts with a vowel. So ab ancilla is my agent.
vino is my instrument. This one isn't a particularly violent sentence, unlike all my others it seems!
“The cup was filled with wine by the slave girl”
Quick recap
How to spot the difference between agent and instrument.
An agent is the person who is doing the passive action, whereas the instrument is how the action was done.
For the agent, you need an a or an ab preposition. But for the ablative of instrument, no preposition is needed.
An agent is used mainly with passive verbs, but the instrument can be used with any voice of verb.
Top Tip: The agent's usually going to be a person, and the instrument is usually going to be a thing.
Now this isn’t always the case: you could have “the room was filled with people”, therefore the people would be the ablative of instrument. As a general gist though, if you're just starting out with agent and instrument, agents are probably going to be people, instruments are probably going to be things.
Remember: no matter what, these are going to be in the ablative case. If you're not sure about your ablative endings, or any of your noun endings, go and download my free noun endings reference guide, it'll be really helpful just to have it to hand.
And that's that!
I hope this post has been helpful to you. If it has, let me know in the comments. If you have any questions, do feel free to ask them.
Otherwise, thank you so much for joining me and I'll see you next time on bambasbat!