Chapter VIII - Juxtaposition of Active and Passive Forms of the Same Verb

Summary

Asyndeton with an active verb form alongside a passive form of the same verb is rare in Latin. Just five clear-cut (single-word) instances have been noted, as far as I am aware, and to these may be added a slightly extended pair in Tacitus (see the next paragraph but one). Pairings of active and passive forms are more common when there is a coordinator (see Wills 1996: 295–8 for an extensive but mixed collection of material mostly from poetry, a good deal of it comprising not coordinations but actives and passives near each other in different types of clauses; for the coordinated type note e.g. Tac. Ann. 3.55.2 plebem socios regna colere et coli licitum). Wills states (296) that ‘the combination of voices in a “bimembre asyndeton” was possibly idiomatic’, a view that is at variance with the evidence, given that such pairs almost always have a coordinator. It will also be seen below that the few asyndetic examples are not a single type, such that the term ‘idiomatic’ might be appropriate.