I came, I saw, I conquered

来た見た勝った (kita mita katta): I came, I saw, I conquered. 来た kita is came; 見た mita is saw; 勝った katta is won; three verbs in the plain past with nothing between them, as terse as the Latin, and Japanese leaves the I to the speaker as Latin leaves it to the verb ending. Caesar's veni, vidi, vici announced the victory at Zela in 47 BC, in a letter to a friend in Rome by Plutarch's account and on a placard in his triumph by Suetonius's. 来た見た勝った is the rendering every Japanese reference work gives; a 1931 writer put it in the classical perfect, 來たり見たり勝ちたり, praising the directness of the ancients, and the modern form is the one the dictionaries keep and the one on the design.