The Ultimate Guide to the Latin Locative Case

Wondering what’s up with the Latin locative case? Look no further. This post will explain everything you need to know.

The locative case is often overlooked, and it isn’t really surprising. After all, it doesn’t have full status as a Latin case. The locative only exists for certain words and only appears in certain contexts.

For this reason, Latin textbooks often don’t introduce the locative until later chapters. But just because the locative is rarer than other cases doesn’t mean it isn’t important.

Some of the most common Latin words use the locative, so you will need a grasp of the locative to read Latin fluently!

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Latin Locative Case: Basic Facts

The locative case has only one surviving function: it expresses the place where something is or occurs. This makes sense if you think about what ”locative” means.

“Locative” comes from the Latin cāsus locātīvus or ”locative case”. Locātīvus, in turn, derives from the verb locō or ”locate”. This means that the locative quite literally is the ”locating” case.

Think about English words like ”locate”, ”location”, “locus”, and ”local.” These all include the same Latin root. This should make it easy to remember what the locative is all about.

But wait. If you are familiar with the Latin ablative case, you may be confused. Isn’t one of the uses of the ablative to express place where?

Yes. And this isn’t a coincidence. The ablative case has gradually stolen the locative’s place in Latin. Where once the locative was used, now the ablative appears.

The locative has held firm in a few places, however. In the remainder of this post, we will talk about those instances.

What Latin nouns have the locative case?

Most nouns no longer have a distinct locative form. The locative only appears in the following types of nouns:

1. Names of cities and towns
2. Names of small islands
3. domus, rūs, humus, and a few other nouns

You may be thinking – what? And yes, this is a rather bizarre list of categories. But they make sense in the context of language change.

All of these categories deal with location. You would frequently say that something happens at Rome or in a house. For this reason, the locative forms of these words were more common, and that’s why they stuck around.

And now we need to talk about the size of islands. How small is a small island? (This is probably not a question that you expected in your Latin studies!)

Generally speaking, most islands of the Mediterranean are “small” in terms of locative use. Rhodes – which appears in the locative – appears to be the dividing line between “small” and “large” islands.

Thus islands like Sicily, Sardinia, Corsica, and Crete are all “big” and do not appear in the locative. Instead, they take the ablative with in.

But, confusingly, Cyprus – the third largest island in the Mediterranean – does have a locative form. Romans use both the locative Cyprī and the ablative in Cyprō to say “in Cyprus.”

Clearly there was some ambiguity. The idea seems to be that if an island was thought of as a single place, it appeared in the locative. If, on the other hand, it was viewed as a territory with multiple destinations, it appeared in the ablative.

Modern scholars invented the Rhodes rule in an attempt to understand the rationale behind locative use. Ordinary Romans did not know the sizes of all the islands off the top of their head -instead they just chose the case form that felt right to them.

Locative Case Endings in Latin

In the plural, the locative is always identical to the ablative. The locative singular of first and second declension nouns is the same as the genitive, while the locative singular of third declension nouns is the same as the ablative.

Here is a chart that lists the locative endings for each noun declension:

Declension	Locative Singular	Locative Plural
First	ae	īs
Second	ī	īs
Third	e / ī	ibus

The locative really only appears in the first, second, and third declensions. This is because the names of cities and towns are confined to these three declensions.

The one exception to this is the locative of the fourth declension noun, domus, which is domī. But domus is such a highly irregular noun that it doesn’t really count – especially since domī is a second-declension form.

Examples of the Locative Case in Latin

Now you know which nouns take the locative and what the locative endings are, so let’s look at some concrete examples.

Noun	Locative	Meaning
Rōma, ae	Rōmae	in Rome
Carthāgō, Carthāginis	Carthāgine	in Carthage
Cyprus, ī	Cyprī	in Cyprus
Athēnae, ārum	Athēnīs	in Athens
Lugdūnum, ī	Lugdūnī	in Lyons
Rhodus, ī	Rhodī	in Rhodes

In this first chart, I have listed the names of cities, towns, and small islands. But, as I mentioned earlier, a few other words can also appear in the locative. They are in the next chart.

Noun	Locative	Meaning
domus, ūs	domī	at home
humus, ī	humī	on the ground
rūs, rūris	rūrī	in the country
bellum, ī	bellī	at war
mīlitia, ae	mīlitiae	at war
animus, ī	animī	in spirit, in mind, at heart

Bellī and mīlitiae are used in contrast to domī, “at home.” The two terms are equivalent and convey that someone is away on military service.

Now let’s look at some examples of the locative used in sentences.

Do adjectives have a locative?

So far in this post I have exclusively talked about nouns in the locative. But what about adjectives? Do they have a locative form, too?

The answer is complicated, and some uncertainty remains. But the consensus seems to be that possessive adjectives can be declined in the locative, but other adjectives cannot.

(The Latin possessive adjectives are meus, a, um; tuus, a, um; suus, a, um; noster, nostra, nostrum; and vester, vestra, vestrum.)

Possessive adjectives in Latin are all first and second declension adjectives. So, in the singular, their locative form is the same as the genitive. In the plural, their locative form is the same as the ablative.

In practice, we only see the locative of these adjectives used to modify domī. Since domus, ūs is a feminine noun, this means that the most common adjectival locative ending is –ae.

Cūr domī meae mānsistī? = Why did you remain in my home?

Amīcī domī tuae sedēbant. = The friends were sitting in your house.

But what happens if you need to describe the house with an adjective? In such instances, the Romans did not use the locative at all.

Instead, they put domus in the ablative following the preposition in. Then the accompanying adjective can be in the ablative case. Here is an example from Cicero.

Hāc tē in domō tam diū dēversārī nōn pudet?

Aren’t you ashamed to tarry so long in this house?

Cicero, Philippics, 2.68.5

Cicero gives us another convenient example, as well.

in Mārcī Crassī castissimā domō

in the most chaste home of Marcus Crassus

Cicero, Pro Caelio, 9.9

Clearly, the Romans avoided putting adjectives in the locative.

NOTE: The exception to this is if the adjective is part of the place name, as is the case with Teānum Āpulum, “Apulian Teanum”. Cicero uses the locative form Teānī Āpulī; Āpulī is technically an adjective in the locative (Pro Cluentio 27).

If these little details confuse you, don’t worry. The important thing to remember is that most adjectives do not have locative forms. This means that nouns like domus sometimes appear in the ablative so that they can be modified by adjectives.

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Final Thoughts

The locative case has a limited use in Latin, but it is still important to be able to recognize it. This is because many place names and common words like domus make frequent use of the locative.

What I would recommend is memorizing the locative for a few city names and for domus, rūs, and humus. Then you will be in good shape to identify this case when you see it in Latin texts.

If you would like to go even deeper into the nitty-gritty details of the locative, you can consult the following resources.

• §426-429 of Allen and Greenough’s, my favorite Latin grammar
• §311-317 of Bradley’s Arnold, a helpful Latin prose composition manual

I hope that you now feel more confident with regard to the locative case in Latin! Don’t forget to read my beginner-friendly guide to all seven Latin cases.

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Ablative Case