The use of the present tense to refer to past events may depend on two conceptual scenarios. First, the speaker may be mentally displaced to the past. Second, the speaker may pretend that the past events are currently accessible in the form of a representation. This 'representation' scenario is generally the most economic conceptual explanation for the use of the present tense to refer past events. Examples are discussed to illustrate the argument: passages from the novels of Alexandre Dumas and from Thomas Hughes' Tom Brown's schooldays; narratives accompanying security camera footage; a narrative by a character in an episode of Seinfeld; and passages from Thucydides. In all these cases the use of the present tense to refer to past events can be made sense of in terms of a conceptual representation scenario, where the difference lies in the exact nature of the representation. The more concrete the representation, the stronger the tendency for the speaker to use the present tense to designate the described events.

In this chapter I deal first with asyndeton bimembre, then with some longer types, and finally say something about other forms of coordination in Lucilius.

In this chapter I collect and discuss all instances of asyndeton bimembre in eighteen speeches of Cicero, in two philosophical works and in half of the letters Ad Atticum and half of those Ad familiares.

Catullus’ practice reveals a good deal about the status and currency of types of asyndeta.

In VI–XI six types of asyndeton have been examined that are marked by a grammatical (usually morphological) feature of both or one of the terms. The diversity of the types, and particularly the variations in their distributions, are already enough to make it clear that there is no point in trying to come up with a single adjective or phrase that might characterise asyndeton bimembre (‘sacral’, ‘tragic’, ‘reflecting the ancient carmen’, ‘expressing rapidity’, etc). The different types vary particularly in their frequency across genres, literary and non-literary.

The term ‘list’ is not particularly helpful in characterising asyndeton and its types, though it (or an equivalent) does have a place in the literature. One ‘special type’ of asyndeton, according to Hofmann and Szantyr (1965: 830), is ‘asyndeton enumerativum’. But virtually any asyndetic sequence, particularly of names, nouns or adjectives, may be seen as a list. A series of adjectives describing the physical features or character of a person is a list of personal characteristics, the itinerary of a traveller is a list of places, the names of persons appointed to some organisation for a fixed period make up a list of officials or officers, and so on. When is an asyndetic sequence not a list? A pair or series of verbs describing actions in a temporal sequence (they stopped, turned, fled) would not be well described as a list. Pairs of terms with certain semantic relationships, such as opposites of various sorts (left/right; up/down; good/bad, go/return), are not list-like. A pair of verbs consisting of a simplex followed by its compound is not a list. It may be more helpful to identify types of lists. One of these, of some importance in relation to asyndeton, I will call ‘open-ended’ or composed of ‘illustrations’. I start however with a different type, which is perhaps more familiar to anyone using the term ‘list’. This type expresses a totality or finite set.

Pairs of imperatives, used asyndetically, are common from early Latin (see e.g. Adams 2016: 558 listing examples from the early Republic; see too XXII.4.4 for asyndetic pairs of imperatives in Umbrian). The significance of the structure (in relation to overt coordination) in the early period may be illustrated with some details about one of its manifestations, that comprising i (or ite) + imperative (see particularly the discussion of Sjögren 1900: 82–91). In Plautus (and also Terence) this type of asyndeton is commonplace, and it tends to occur in formulae or idioms suggestive of everyday speech. By contrast in Cato Agr. coordinated pairs of imperatives (with -que the usual connective) far outnumber asyndetic (by about 80:5: see Adams 2016: 80), but a factor is that most imperatives in Cato are of the -to form, and it must have been the commonplace present imperative that was usual in ordinary speech. In all examples cited below from Plautus at least one member of the pair is a present imperative.

‘Asyndeton’ has been used by classicists in mixed ways. In this book I use the term as it is used in modern linguistics, to refer to a form of coordination. Various other phenomena, though interesting in their own right and often labelled ‘asyndeta’ by classical commentators and others, are left aside, worthy as they may be of study. I start with ‘coordination’.

If two terms are juxtaposed without a coordinator they need not be in asyndeton, though it is commonly assumed in commentaries that any juxtaposed words of the same part of speech must be asyndetic. There are various relationships between two words that may rule out the insertion of a coordinator. For example, if the two are adjectives, they may differ hierarchically (see e.g. Quirk et al. 1972: 550–1), a distinction sometimes referred to as ‘rank’. Or one may be attributive and the other predicative, or a secondary predicate (see below). A pair may form an ‘appositional compound’. Again, one term may be a modifier of the other, with overt coordination possibly unnecessary or inappropriate, though this type is rather nebulous. All these categories will be illustrated below. Perhaps most important are the roles of adjectives, such as attributive versus predicative. The distinction is sometimes neglected in literary commentaries.