sciebant

Sciebant is the imperfect active indicative form of the Latin verb scire, meaning “to know.” It functions as the third-person plural imperfect tense, translating as “they knew” or “they used to know.” The verb scire is a common cognition verb in Latin, used in both narrative and expository prose to express knowledge, awareness, or belief about a fact, event, or proposition.

In terms of morphology, scire is irregular in some forms but behaves like a standard Latin verb with the present indicative scio, scis, scit, scimus, scitis, sciunt and the imperfect sciebam, sciebas, sciebat, sciebamus, sciebatis, sciebant. The perfect system includes scivi, scivisti, scivit, scivimus, scivistis, sciverunt, while the perfect passive participle is scitum. The imperfect sciebant is often used in narrative to set background knowledge or to describe beliefs held in the past.

Usage and construction: sciebant is commonly followed by direct objects or by indirect statements introduced by infinitives. It can appear with accusative and infinitive constructions to report what someone knew, for example: sciebant illum id fecisse (“they knew that he had done it”) or sciebant illum innocentem esse (“they knew that he was innocent”). The form is standard in classical Latin and appears frequently in historical, philosophical, and literary texts to ground statements in a known past.

Origin and meaning: scire derives from a Proto-Indo-European root related to knowledge, with cognates across Latin and other languages. In Latin usage, sciebant remains a basic, widely understood way to express past knowledge within a narrative or argumentative context.