Genitive with Verbs (Memory, Charge, Feeling)
A handful of Latin verbs reach for the genitive instead of the accusative — and they cluster into four families you can learn as a pack: MEMORY (meminī tuī, "I am mindful of you"), CHARGE in court (accūsātur prōditiōnis, "he is accused of treason"), FEELING in impersonals (mē tuī miseret, "I pity you"), and VALUE / INTEREST (magnī aestimō, "I value it highly"; meā interest, "it concerns me").
The through-line is partitive: the genitive marks what the action is about, not what it grabs. Meminī tuī means "I hold you in mind," not "I capture you mentally." The trap is that several of these verbs ALSO take the accusative with a different shade — meminī Cinnam is "I remember Cinna (as an acquaintance)," meminī tuī is "I think of you fondly." Mood and warmth, not just grammar, are what swing the case.
Learnings0 core · 1 AP claim
AP framework claims (1)— verbatim from AP CED
MEMORY (meminī) / CHARGE (accūsō) / FEELING-impersonal (mē pudet) / VALUE-INTEREST (aestimō, interest) — all reach for the genitive of what the verb is ABOUT.
With interest / rēfert, a personal pronoun is replaced by the feminine ablative possessive — meā not meī.
See It In Action
— Verr. ii. 136
Reflexive suī is genitive — exactly the pattern A&G § 350 NOTE 1 names: personal and reflexive pronouns regularly go genitive with meminī even when an accusative could appear elsewhere.
— Sall. Cat. 21
Verbs of reminding govern TWO cases at once: accusative for the person you nudge, genitive for the topic you nudge them about. Sallust runs the pair twice in one breath to show Catiline working the room.
— Sall. Iug. 4
Textbook impersonal — accusative mē is the one feeling, genitive cīvitātis mōrum is what triggers the disgust. English flips the subject ("I am sick"), but in Latin the verb has no nominative subject at all.
— Fam. vii. 23. 4
Cicero shows both shapes side by side: with a personal pronoun, interest takes the feminine ablative possessive meā — never meī. With a noun phrase like utrīusque nostrum, the regular genitive returns. A&G § 355.a calls this out as the only construction in classical prose.
Two confusions in one: (1) meminī takes EITHER case with a meaning shift, and (2) the piget-family impersonals reverse what most students expect — the FEELER is accusative, the CAUSE is genitive.
meminī + gen.: warm, regardful sense; pronouns of person regularly go gen.
meminī tuī
I think of you (fondly)
meminī + acc.: literal recall of someone or something experienced
Cinnam meminī
I remember Cinna (saw him)
Tip: Two checks. With meminī: is the object a personal/reflexive pronoun (tuī, suī) or an abstract noun? Likely genitive. Is it a concrete person or thing experienced? Likely accusative. With paenitet / pudet / piget / taedet / miseret: the person is ALWAYS accusative, the cause ALWAYS genitive — mē tuī miseret = "I pity you," never the other way around.
In Sallust's mē cīvitātis mōrum piget taedetque (Iug. 4), what jobs are mē and cīvitātis mōrum doing?
Study Tips
- •Bucket the verbs by family before you memorize forms — MEMORY, CHARGE, FEELING (impersonal), VALUE / INTEREST. The case follows the family, not the lemma.
- •Whenever you see paenitet, pudet, piget, taedet, or miseret, expect an accusative person and a genitive cause: mē cīvitātis mōrum piget — "I am sick of the ways of the state."
- •With meminī and oblīvīscor, ask whether the object is a person/thing being recalled (accusative) or held in mind with feeling (genitive). Pronouns like tuī, suī, meī almost always go genitive.