Puer matri fatetur se nummos ex crumena cepisse.

Because fateor often takes the person you confess or admit something to in the dative.

So:

• matri = to the mother
• it is the indirect object of fatetur

This is similar to English He admits to his mother...

Because fateor, fateri, fassus sum is a deponent verb.

A deponent verb:

• has passive forms
• but an active meaning

So fatetur is grammatically a passive-looking form, but it means:

• he admits
• he confesses

not he is admitted.

Se is the reflexive pronoun, meaning himself / herself / themselves.

Here it refers back to the subject of the main verb, which is puer.

So the sentence says that the boy admits that he himself took the coins.

If Latin used a different pronoun, it could suggest that someone else took them. Using se makes it clear that the one confessing and the one who took the coins are the same person.

Because Latin often expresses that-clauses after verbs like say, think, know, admit with an accusative + infinitive construction.

So instead of a clause like:

• that he took the coins

Latin uses:

• se ... cepisse

In this construction:

• the subject of the infinitive goes into the accusative
• the verb goes into the infinitive

So se is accusative because it is the subject of cepisse.

Because after fatetur, Latin uses indirect statement rather than a finite clause introduced by that.

English says:

• The boy admits that he took the coins

Latin says, more literally:

• The boy admits himself to have taken the coins

That is why cepisse is an infinitive, not a form like cepit.

Cepisse is the perfect active infinitive of capio.

It is perfect because the taking happened before the admitting.

So the timeline is:

1. he took the coins
2. he admits it

That is exactly what the perfect infinitive expresses in indirect statement: an action earlier than the main verb.

It comes from the verb capio, capere, cepi, captum.

Its perfect infinitive is built from the perfect stem:

• cepi = I took
• cepisse = to have taken

So the change from cap- to cep- is just part of the verb’s principal parts. This is something you have to learn with the verb.

Nummos is accusative plural.

It is the direct object of cepisse:

• nummos cepisse = to have taken the coins

So:

• se = subject of the infinitive
• nummos = object of the infinitive

That whole unit forms the content of what the boy admits.

Ex means out of or from, and it takes the ablative.

So:

• crumena is ablative singular
• ex crumena = out of the purse / from the purse

This tells you where the coins were taken from.

Because classical Latin usually does not use a conjunction like English that after verbs of saying, thinking, knowing, perceiving, or admitting.

Instead, it normally uses accusative + infinitive:

• fatetur se nummos ex crumena cepisse

This is the standard Latin way to express the idea that English puts into a that-clause.

Latin word order is much more flexible than English word order, because the endings show each word’s role.

In this sentence:

• Puer is nominative, so it is the subject
• matri is dative, so it is the person confessed to
• se is accusative, the subject of the infinitive
• nummos is accusative, the object of the infinitive
• crumena is ablative after ex

So even if the order changes, the endings still tell you how the sentence works.

The given order is quite natural:

• Puer first introduces the main subject
• matri comes early as the person addressed
• fatetur introduces the confession
• then the indirect statement follows

Because Latin has no articles.

So puer can mean:

• the boy
• a boy

and nummos can mean:

• the coins
• coins

The context tells you which is best in English.