There are three things to point out about this discussion 1 The material concept of time Time here is not intended as an abstract entity a chronological coordinate as we are used to A time is the complex of all existing beings things circumstances and processes occurring in a particular historical instant So it s like an enormous set including everything existing or going on at that moment If you consider the next instant another enormous set is determined and that s different form the previous one as many things or situations have been changed So we are included in the times because we are among the countless things and beings contained in the flowing times 2 Sorry Memoro but I must notice that your feeling of a possible deponent behaviour of the verb muto is baseless and factually incorrect Indeed consulting several Latin grammars and dictionaries I found no trace no hint of a use of muto as a deponent or semi deponent verb at least in the classics Simply when a verb is provided with both forms active and passive it can not be a deponent It is however true that mutare as well as to change in English may have a transitive or intransitive meaning When it is transitive there is someone who performs changing and someone who undergoes it so we can use the active or passive form to determine who s the agent We can say I change you or I am changed by you leaving no doubt on who s the author and who the object of changing In the second case the passive one it s wholly evident that change is not due to my will With the intransitive meaning instead the concept of voluntariness of change remains more shaded and vague When I say I change I make quite clear that some changing is affecting myself but nothing is said about whether this change is due to my will or to the events circumstances or somebody else s will Thus using the active form with intransitive meaning we can leave an open door to both possibilities a I am changing because I actually want to or b I am forced to change by circumstances or others Therefore whoever was the author of this maxim he had a simple way to let us think that we might be the artificers of our own change He only had to write the verb in its active form mutamus A simple s instead of an r That wouldn t even afffect the hexameter s rhythm But he purposedly in my opinion chose the passive form so expressly underlining our passivity to the change Moreover he used a special trick to give an even stronger emphasis to the passivity Normally speaking in Latin one would say et nos mutamur but here we see nos et mutamur Exchanging the pronoun with the conjunction is a rare expedient to emphasize the latter in Latin language everything that comes after has higher importance in a sentence s context This special exchange serves to point out that this nos et is not a simple et nos we should translate it as and we too but other stronger translations could be and we forcedly and we ineluctably and we a fortiori All this drives me to the conclusion that the sentence s author wanted to stress as much strongly as possible that we are passive poor things in front of the general changing going on through the entire universe So the true extensive meaning of the phrase is When everything existing in the universe is subject to change by circumstances and force majeure how could we poor little human things pretend not being changed as well This way of reasoning comes quite natural if you think in Latin 3 According to the ancient and medieval way of thinking this sentence is nothing else than an Aristotelian categorical syllogism i e the basic unit of logical reasoning Here we have a major premise Tempora mutantur a minor premise in illis saying that we humans are included in times a conclusion nos et mutamur That simply means we are forced to change because we are part of all things that are changed In mathematical logic and set theory these relations concern set inclusion So here are a set H containing all humans a set T containing all times as defined above and an even bigger set C containg all things beings situations processes and complexes af all them that are subject to changing The minor premise states that H is included in T the major premise says T is included in C and the conclusion is H is included in C In other words this is what s usually defined as the transitive property of inclusion Thus a synthetic translation of our sentence in sheer mathematical terms is H T T C H C