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In Forō

Metella Vestem Ēmit

-it, -ērunt

Operative, your recent immersions have shown you a second past tense beside the imperfect. It is called the perfect tense, and it is the tense Latin most often uses to narrate events that are finished.

Translate a perfect verb as a plain English "-ed" verb. Where the imperfect looks back on action still unfolding ("he was walking," "he used to walk"), the perfect reports a completed act ("he walked").

The imperfect announced itself with the marker -bā-. The perfect has no single marker like that. Instead almost every verb builds its perfect on a distinctive perfect stem, and once you learn to spot that stem the tense gives itself away. From this point forward, the perfect stem is shown in orange.

Take amō ("I love"), whose present stem is am-. Its perfect stem is amāv-:

The perfect stem changes shape from verb to verb, so watch for it. The endings, though, are steady and easy to recognize: -it for the singular, -ērunt for the plural. Notice that the singular still closes with the familiar -t, and the plural still closes with the familiar -nt, the same person-markers you know from the present and imperfect.

fuit, fuērunt

The verb sum ("to be") builds its past tenses in its own way, with no -bā- and no ordinary perfect stem. You have already met its imperfect (erat, erant). Here is the full third-person picture across the three tenses you now know:

Because sum is irregular, the surest path to attunement is simply to meet these forms often and learn them by sight.

Operative, before you spend Sextus's coins, understand where you are headed. The forum was the beating heart of every Roman town, at once marketplace, law court, town hall, and temple precinct. Romans did not spread these functions across a city the way we often do; they piled them around a single open square and lived their public lives shoulder to shoulder.

This short video briefing, courtesy of the American Institute for Roman Culture, will help you become more attuned to the forum:

In a planned Roman town the forum sat where the two main streets crossed, so that everyone passing through the town passed through it. Wheeled traffic was kept out, which is why Informational Text A shows plaustra and currūs unable to enter: this was a space for people on foot. That text also walks you around the buildings ringing the square, the basilica where lawsuits were heard, the cūria where the council met, and the many temples. Here we look instead at what filled the square itself: business.

Roman business ran on people, not price tags. The Romans distinguished roughly two kinds of businessmen: mercātōrēs, traders who often dealt in goods carried from far away and sold in quantity, and negōtiātōrēs, dealers and financiers who handled larger commercial affairs. Working among them were the argentāriī, the bankers and money-changers, who set up tables in and near the forum to weigh coins, change currency, and lend at interest. Caecilius, who calls himself argentārius, is exactly this kind of man, which is why he prizes the peace that keeps money moving.

The coin Sextus gave you, the dēnārius, was a silver piece; Romans also reckoned in the bronze as and the sestertius. Nothing in the market carried a fixed price. A buyer was expected to haggle, and a fair price was the one buyer and seller talked their way to. This is why Sextus tells you that twenty denarii buy one item at full price but two if you bargain well.

Roman prices were counted in Roman numerals. This short video briefing, courtesy of latintutorial.com, will help you become more attuned to them:

Much of what filled a great market had traveled a long way, and the cheapest way to move heavy goods was by sea, not by road. Grain from Egypt and North Africa, wine and olive oil shipped in tall clay jars called amphorae, along with spices, fine cloth, and gemstones, all reached Italy by ship. Roman trade reached remarkably far: goods and even embassies passed between Rome and India, and Roman demand for silk pulled trade routes toward China.

Hold on to one idea as you shop. In the forum, buying, worship, lawsuits, and politics all happened in one square, shoulder to shoulder, and a seller had no price tag to hide behind. What protected a buyer was not a posted price but a seller's reputation and his word. The story you read in KEY-TEXT "In Forō" turns on exactly that.