Operatives, welcome to CODEX 5. Make your selection.

Hominēs

Rōma

Small Words That Carry You Places

You can now find the three main parts of a Latin sentence: the doer, the receiver, and the action. The last thing to learn is a set of small words that tell you where everything is happening.

These small words are called prepositions. A preposition links a noun to the rest of the sentence, usually to say where something is, where it comes from, or where it is going. English has them too: in, from, to, toward. In Latin, a preposition and its noun travel together as a pair. You can read the pair as one chunk of meaning.

The Rome key-text is full of these chunks: in Rōmā, in Rome; in Forō, in the Forum; and in templō, in the temple. The chunk ex montibus means from the mountains, which is where the water comes from, down the long aqueducts. The chunk ad omnēs terrās means to all lands, which is where the roads go. Read those five chunks in a row and you have toured the city, from the temple at its center to the mountains behind it and the roads running out to everywhere else.

When you meet a preposition, take its noun with it and set the pair aside as one piece. What is left is a sentence you already know how to read. In aqua ex montibus venit, set aside ex montibus, from the mountains, and you are left with aqua venit, the water comes. That is a doer and an action, just as before. The chunk you set aside tells you where the water came from.

Considera: The very first Latin sentence in Operation FALX was in CODEX 1: deī in Monte Olympō sunt, the gods are on Mount Olympus. Find the preposition and its noun, set them aside, and read what is left. You have been reading sentences like this since CODEX 1, and now you know how you did it.

What Mortals Made of the Gift

The first key-text begins with a plain fact: hominēs in terrā vīvunt, mortals live on the earth. They are small, they are not gods, and they are not strong. Then they are given fire: hominēs ignem habent, mortals have fire.

Once mortals have fire, the key-text fills up with things they do. They prepare food, cibum parant, and they build houses, domōs faciunt, and temples, templa faciunt. They keep the fire burning in those temples, ignem in templīs servant. They learn, teach, write, and read, and they build one city, then another, then many. The whole key-text is a list of things mortals made, and every line of it goes back to that one gift.

Each gift led to another. With fire, mortals could cook, which changed what they could eat and how far they could travel. They could melt metal out of rock and make tools. They had light after dark, which gave them more hours in the day, and warmth in winter, which let them live in cold places they could never have survived before. In the old story, every Roman road, every aqueduct, and every word carved in stone began when Prometheus reached into the gods' hearth and carried a flame down to people who had nothing.

Considera: The key-text says hominēs nōn sunt validī, mortals are not strong, and hominēs nōn sunt deī, mortals are not gods. The rest of the key-text is a long list of things mortals do. What makes the difference between what mortals are and what they can do?

Rome: One City Out of All of Them

The first key-text ends by narrowing from many cities to one: ūna urbs est magna. ūna urbs est clāra. ūna urbs est Rōma. One city is great, one city is famous, and that city is Rome. The second key-text begins there: Rōma nōn est sōla urbs. sed Rōma est ūna urbs ex omnibus. Rome is not the only city, but it is one city out of all of them, and it shows what mortals can do at their very best.

The key-text then takes you through the city. The temple of Vesta stands in the Forum, at the center of everything, and the fire inside it never goes out: ignis semper ārdet. You have been carrying a piece of that fire ever since Vesta's hearth. The flame Vesta gave you, the flame Prometheus stole for mortals, and the flame the Vestals tend in the Forum are all the same fire, passed from hand to hand across all of mythic time. It began as a gift from the gods, and it became the heart of a whole city.

Rome built roads, viae, that ran to every corner of the world the Romans knew. It brought water down from the mountains through aqueducts, viās aquae, long channels of stone and brick that carried fresh water into the city for people to drink and bathe in. It gave its citizens law, lēx, which protected them and held the city together. And Rome had a language: lingua est Latīna. Then the key-text says something surprising: nōs quoque Latīnē legimus, we too read in Latin. That "we" includes you, right now, reading these words, and it makes you part of the chain that runs from Prometheus's gift all the way to today.

Considera: The key-text names roads, water, law, and language. Which of those do you think mattered most to the people who lived in Rome, and why?

Hūmānitās: What It Means to Be Fully Human

Romans had a word for what makes a person fully human: hūmānitās. It gave us the English word "humanity," and for Romans it meant something more specific.

Hūmānitās was the idea that a person could grow, through learning and practice, into the best kind of human being. A person with hūmānitās had learned a great deal, cared about other people, could speak well and think clearly, and knew about the world beyond their own front door. Cicero, a famous Roman speaker and one of the greatest writers of Latin, said that hūmānitās is what makes a civilization possible. He meant being willing to learn, to teach, to build something bigger than yourself, and to treat other people with respect.

Look at the first key-text again. It moves from fire to food, to houses and temples, to learning and writing, and finally to cities, and that whole path is hūmānitās at work. Mortals are small and weak, but they take what they are given and build with it. They learn and they teach, hominēs discunt, hominēs docent, and they write and they read, hominēs scrībunt, hominēs legunt. They tend sacred fires, make laws, and build cities. Everything from that first flame to Rome shows what hūmānitās can do when it has room to grow.

What Prometheus's Plan Would Unmake

When you spoke to Prometheus through the seam in Tellus's chamber, you argued from ordō: the order of the world, the chain of events, the shape of everything. Prometheus heard you and turned away, because the shape of the world was not enough to change his mind.

This time, you can make your argument about the people who live in that world.

If Prometheus keeps the falx, Saturn never frees the Titans, Jupiter never rises, and the Olympians never build the world mortals will live in. Mortals are never born at all, and the fire Prometheus stole has no one to give it to. No house, temple, road, law, or city is ever built. Rome never exists, the Vestal flame never burns, and the language you have been learning to read is never spoken at all.

Prometheus did all of this for mortals. He stole fire because he loved them, and he suffered because he chose them. The world he now wants to undo is the world his own gift built. To save himself, he would have to give up the very people he once saved, the ones who took his gift and made it into everything you have just read about.

The fire in your hand is his fire, and you are his mortals. When you speak to him on the Caucasus, you are the proof of your own argument.

Considera: The ordō argument said: the world has a shape, and you are breaking it. The hūmānitās argument says something different. In your own words, what does it say?