Questions & Answers about Pax in urbe servanda est.
What are the dictionary forms of the words in Pax in urbe servanda est?
They are:
- pax, pacis — peace
- urbs, urbis — city
- servo, servare, servavi, servatus — to preserve, keep, save
- sum, esse, fui — to be
So servanda comes from servo, and est comes from sum.
Why is pax in the nominative, not pacem?
Because pax is the subject of the Latin sentence.
Latin is using a construction that literally means something like peace is to be preserved in the city. In that structure, the thing that must be preserved becomes the grammatical subject, so it stands in the nominative.
An English speaker may expect an object, as in we must preserve peace, but Latin often expresses this idea differently.
What exactly is servanda?
Servanda is a gerundive, sometimes also called the future passive participle.
In this sentence, it means something like to be preserved or needing to be preserved.
So:
- servanda est = must be preserved / is to be preserved
This is a very common Latin way of expressing necessity or obligation.