- In triumpho Caesar praetulit hunc titulum "Veni, vidi, vici."
veni, vidi, vici: each verb here is in the first person singular, perfect indicative active. This is a famous quote from Caesar and it shows something about how sentences work in both English and Latin. We are told that a sentence is "a complete thought" and we sometimes also told that a sentence has only one main verb (unless another main verb is joined to the first with "and" or "but" or another coordinating conjunction. Here, we have three main verbs, but we do not have three sentences: Caesar uses "asyndeton" (lack of conjunction") to create what is really a complex sentence meaning: "After I came and saw, I conquered." We can do the same thing in English and so we don't usually think about just exactly what is happening -- and that is part of the point: Caesar is a man of action, one action leads to another, simple, plain.
In triumph, Caesar displayed this placard: "I came, I saw, I conquered."
This statement from Suetonius, a biographer who wrote the lives of the early Roman emperors (beginning with Julius Caesar), records perhaps Caesar's most famous statement. Three verbs capture his speed, his intelligence and his manly action.
habuerunt: 3rd person plural, perfect active indicative; from the verb habeo, habere, habui, habitum.
dedit: 3rd person singular perfect indicative active; from do, dare, dedi, datum.
Remember that you give (dare) an accusative (a direct object) to a dative (an indirect object). So Romanis is the indirect object: it is dative plural masculine/feminine. (In fact, this is where we get the word "dative" from (look at the 4th principle part): the dative is the "given to" case.)
The kings held Rome from the beginning; Lucius Brutus gave freedom to the Romans.
Tacitus begins his history with this sentence. The first clause can be read as an hexameter line (the meter for Roman epic). One should note that in the beginning Rome was the possession of kings, but that Brutus made libertas a gift, and hence the possession of, Romans. Brutus change Rome from a "thing" that kings could possess into an ideal that Romans possess.