Expert: Maria - 5/1/2010

Question
hi Maria I've seen this quote 'fortes fortuna iuvat' and am led to believe it translates to 'fortune favors the brave', however i have also seen it written as 'fortes fortuna adiuvat'. what is the difference between 'iuvat' and 'adiuvat'?

Answer
Hello,

First of all I have to point out that both 'fortes fortuna iuvat' and 'fortes fortuna adiuvat' are nothing but an adaptation of the quotation from Virgil’s Aeneid, book 10, line 284, where the Roman poet wrote: ”Audentes  fortuna iuvat” just meaning “Fortune favors the brave” or “Fortune favors the bold”.

Therefore, if you want to use the true quotation from Virgil, you must say “Audentes fortuna iuvat”.

If on the contrary you want to use its adaptation, i.e. “Fortes fortuna iuvat” as well as “Fortes fortuna adiuvat”, they both are correct as “iuvat” and “adiuvat” mean the same, that is “favors”.

See below for grammatical analysis.

Best regards,
Maria
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Note that:

-Fortune = FORTUNA (subject, nominative case, 1st.declension)

-favors = IUVAT (present of IUVO) or ADIUVAT (present of ADIUVO). There is no difference between these two verbs.

-the brave/bold= AUDENTES (direct object, literally, ‘those who dare’, since AUDENTES is the plural accusative case of  the present participle of AUDEO, I dare) or FORTES (direct object, accusative plural of the adjective FORTIS, literally “strong”)

As you can see, Latin word order is different from English, simply because Latin is an inflected language where syntactical relationship are indicated by the endings of each term, not by the order of the words.