Next time I go to Ancient Rome, I’m going to tell them just what I think of their deponent verbs.
I mean, what is the point?
Well, an answer is that they are very useful if you want to have a perfect participle with an active meaning.
Hi, I don’t think deponents are explained very well in most books: they’re usually described as verbs with passive voice endings but active voice meanings. This description actually misses out the key voice that matters.
It reminds me of the analogy of looking at the reverse side of a tapestry: a random mess (“why use passive voice endings for an active meaning?”). When you turn it over, it makes sense.
The key voice to understand here is not the active or passive, but the middle. The Latin deponent is an ossified form of the middle of eventive verbs (see e.g. Sihler s. 414a).
Think of a deponent as “middle-only”, like (Greek) ἕπομαι, (Latin) sequor, ‘follow’. Sihler says in s. 414a:
This verb [(Greek) ἕπομαι, (Latin) > sequor> , etc., ‘follow’] is incidentally an example of a whole type, the so-called deponent verbs, that is, verbs which only occur in the middle voice. They are found in all IE languages that preserve the active/middle distinction in more than remnants, but L[atin] is peculiar in that the old middle function (in ossified form) is confined to deponents, and the middle forms that contrast with actives are only > passive> , a distinctly different category.
The confusion traces back I think to the usual (not very good) description of the passive itself, which is really just a use-case of the middle (proto-IE only had the active and middle). The best place to read about Latin deponents is I think Oxford’s Latin syntax s. 5.33 (much better than the surface-level teaching in say Wheelock Ch. 34). For the deeper theme of the middle voice itself, I always go to Sihler but I actually also like the explanation in Whitacre’s new 2021 Grammar of NT Greek pages 15–18, which zooms out from NT Greek and considers the middle more broadly (i.e. worth reading even if you don’t study NT Greek).
Hopefully you can see from this that there’s no “point” to deponents as they are explained in the usual textbooks (active meanings, passive endings), but instead deponents are rather like the tips of ruins poking up through the ground and revealing the deeper history of verb forms (middle voice etc.) that lie underneath.
Cheers, Chad
Thanks Chad. I’m going to have to read that several times 
Oh dear! I just looked up that work. I think it is the most expensive book I’ve ever heard of. I shan’t be buying it.
Yes that book’s expensive (particularly with 2 volumes!). I borrow it from the local uni’s library on a community borrower account.
To be honest, I don’t like all of it: it definitely shows marks of relying more heavily on computer searches (“sometimes X occurs, but sometimes non-X occurs…”), which can be unhelpful when you are looking for the reason why something occurs (as Aristotle says, knowledge involves knowing the why, not just the that). I talked about this here:
http://discourse.textkit.com/t/pinksters-latin-syntax/18805/1
But it’s definitely not the most expensive classics book out there. If you go down the rabbit hole of acquiring rare books ($$), or even handwritten Latin manuscripts from the Renaissance of texts never published ($$$), the Oxford Latin syntax will look like a bargain!
Cheers, Chad