In Latin a noun and participle are sometimes combined in such a way that the weight of the meaning seems to lie in the participle rather than in the noun. This peculiar relationship between participle and noun may be seen in the well-known phrase of dating, ab urbe condita, which for want of an exact definition is often used to identify the construction. Analysis of the words shows that what is really an abstract idea has been expressed in concrete terms. Logical expression would call for an abstract noun in place of the participle, with a second noun in the genitive case, and a translator is forced to have recourse to some such device in order to render the meaning, e.g. ‘from the founding of the city’. Participles of this type can be found in Latin in all the cases except the vocative and in combination with a large number of prepositions.

The statements made in this chapter are based upon an examination of some two hundred examples of that combination of substantive and participle known as the ab urbe condita construction. In my introduction I showed why I considered the classification inexact. However, in discussing the examples which have been so classified in the past, it will be convenient to use the term until a better one can be found.

In five of the passages considered in Chapter I, the participle held the attributive position. Because of this difference in form, I have reserved these passages for separate treatment in another chapter.

In my last chapter I showed that the relation between participle and noun that grammarians have used as the defining characteristic of the ab urbe condita construction is to be found in other uses of the participle as well. This relation I called ‘complementary’. Finding no criterion, either of meaning or of function, that would distinguish the ab urbe condita examples as a group from other complementary participles, I decided that the best procedure would be to list them according to the grammatical function that each performs in its sentence. Arranging them in this way would, I felt, best bring out the mutual similarities and differences that they show and might perhaps throw new light on the complementary participles as a class.

The statement has been made by Stahl and others1 that in the ab urbe condita construction the participle may stand in the attributive, as well as the predicative, position. In support of this, the following passages have been cited: Thuc. 3.53.3; 66.3; Hdt. 7.169; 9.69; Xen. Hell. 6.3.11; Lysias 25.6. In addition I have noted the following, in which attributive participles have been treated as complementary by editors or translators: Thuc. 1.6.1; 3.40.6; 4.87.5; Eur. Hipp. 1336.

The following passages from authors later than Aristotle have been cited by grammarians as illustrating the a. u. c. construction; they have not been used in the preparation of this paper and are given here without comment:

A noun and participle (or adjective) when neither has modifiers may be combined with the article in five different ways: apn, anap,nap; a η ρ, ρ a η. In the first three, the position of the participle is called attributive, in the last two, predicative. The commonest of the attributive positions is a ρ η, as in of the predicative, a n p, In one, the participle stands between article and noun, in the other, the noun stands between article and participle. Because these two orders are so common, one is always startled to find a noun standing between the article and a participle which, because of the context, can only be attributive, or, on the other hand, to find a predicative participle (or adjective) between article and noun. Now both of these phenomena are to be found in the best prose authors. Both are subject, however, to certain laws of order which, as I hope to show, are corollaries of the regular laws of attribution and predication.

My purpose in speaking of the attributive participle as ‘identifying’ has been to avoid the term ‘defining’, which applies to most but not all of the examples. There are some attributive participles that perform a different function, which I have called ‘characterizing’. In the standard grammars, the two types are not, as a rule, distinguished.1

By the time the Homeric poems were written the genitive absolute had already become productive; so any account of its origin must be based wholly on conjecture. It is reasonable to assume, however, that it did not spring spontaneously into being but grew up gradually from one of the earlier uses of the genitive case, and that it followed those laws of linguistic change that have been observed in constructions whose growth can be traced historically.

The difficulty and confusion that can arise from the use of categories that are not mutually exclusive is illustrated in paragraph 2048 of Smyth's Greek Grammar, where the following statements are made, apparently to clarify the definitions of the three kinds of participle: 1. A participle may be both circumstantial and supplementary; 2. The circumstantial participle is used by way of apposition to the subject of the verb and, though strictly predicative, may agree attributively with a noun or pronoun; 3. An attributive participle may be circumstantial.