The Best Kind of Book
What’s the best kind of book for reading Latin literature? Is there a best kind? This question came up recently because a friend of Aeterna Latina recently asked me to recommend a text of Caesar’s De Bello Gallico for her adolescent daughter. In her case, I recommended Hans Friedrich Mueller’s edition (which I’ll discuss in more detail below). Not everyone wants or needs the same kind of book, however. I started out writing about different kinds of reading texts for Caesar’s Commentaries specifically. I was going to call the article “Caesar Gets No Respect” (a reference to comedian Rodney Dangerfield’s tag line).
As fun as that would have been (and believe me, it would have been), I soon realized that I shouldn’t limit this discussion to Caesar. The same variety of approaches that you find in editions of Caesar’s work apply to other authors as well. This is a good thing, because not everybody is looking for the same thing. The good news is that there’s something for everyone. There are books for folks who want or need lots of help, there are versions for those who just want to engage the plain Latin text. If you’re somewhere in between, well, you’re covered too. Our mission, then, is to examine the different sorts of resources to help you decide what works best for you.
The Austere Option
Let’s start with the most austere option. Oxford University Press has long produced Latin editions works without notes or vocabulary. Just the author’s text as it’s been passed down to us. Don’t think of looking for any macrons (long marks). Even the modern preface to most books of this sort is in Latin. The only extra is what’s called the apparatus criticus at the bottom of the page. This curious collection of letters and symbols contains information, for those who know how to read it, about differences in various ancient manuscripts, scholarly conjectures, and other things that are usually of interest to only the most serious scholars. I’m including a photo of my OUP edition of Tacitus’s Annales. You can see the apparatus criticus at the bottom of the page.
Now, less exalted scholars might well have other reasons to prefer a plain text. I used to work as a TA with an online Classical Academy. The school required that the students use plain texts without notes. The idea was that they engage directly with the original Latin, without the distraction of somebody else’s interpretation (or help). As an instructional strategy, this makes sense. The more you work the language through your own reasoning process, the better you will absorb and understand it. More experienced readers may simply prefer a “cleaner” text.
The Latin Library
The Oxford Press isn’t the only source of an unencumbered text. If you don’t mind reading Latin on a screen, The Latin Library (thelatinlibrary.com) contains a wide array of Latin authors. And of course, it’s available free of charge (although they welcome donations). You can find not only Classical authors here, but also Christian, Medieval, and Neo-Latin. The website has been built up and maintained until recently by former George Mason University classicist William Carey. Prof. Carey has now passed The Latin Library on to others, but before he left, he added syllabi and supporting materials from some of his university classes.
I myself much prefer reading anything, but especially Latin, in traditional book form. I’ve written about some of my more special books. There are some distinct advantages, however, to an online format. The biggest asset is the sheer scope of the literature collected here. The Latin Library contains all but the most obscure Latin texts, at least those of general interest. It even contains portions (sadly, not all) of St. Thomas Aquinas’s immense Summa Theologica, and several of his smaller works. I would need to add an entire room to house all the books contained in this one website.
The Latin Library is a useful resource in a number of other ways that a book cannot be. For one thing, it’s a convenient source from which to cut and paste passages for use in student assessments. I also use it to create documents to project on the whiteboard in my classroom. It’s easy to enlarge the font and use either text tools or markers on the whiteboard to lead my students in close analysis of the text.
The Middle Way
Most readers, especially those with less experience, are probably looking for a little more help than the plain texts offer. In Caesar’s case, because he was a staple of the secondary school curriculum for so long, there a lot of textbooks out there with annotated versions of parts, sometimes significant parts, of his Commentaries. For many years, I relied on Jenney’s Second Year Latin as the Caesar text for my classes. You should be warned, however. Oftentimes, these textbooks don’t merely present selected passages from a large work, but also make modifications to those portions they do present. For example, in more recent years I’ve used a particular sentence from Book I of Caesar’s De Bello Gallico to illustrate the difference between indirect commands and indirect statements. I discuss this sentence at length in my article “Caesar as Teacher.”
I found myself looking in Jenney not too long ago and discovered, to my disappointment, that the same sentence is truncated there. The editors, apparently, found Caesar’s deliberate wordsmithing too much for their students. It’s a reasonable supposition that this isn’t the only simplification of Caesar’s prose in the book. Now, that might not be an issue for you. Caesar’s language is mostly intact, and the grammatical and vocabulary notes beneath each passage are quite good. But if you’re looking to read it exactly as Caesar wrote it, at least as exact as we can get it two thousand years later, the standard textbook series is probably not the best choice.
Stand-alone Volumes
In the past few decades, there have been quite a few stand-alone books treating individual authors that are set up in much the same way. These do not usually adapt or modify the author’s language, but they offer the same kind of help by way of notes and vocabulary as a series like Jenney does. Usually more help, in fact. We can get a good idea of how this sort of book is set up by looking at a page from Richard LaFleur’s Love and Transformation: An Ovid Reader.
We see a portion of Ovid’s poem on the upper half of the right-hand page. There are copious notes and vocabulary words on the facing page and underneath the passage as well. This is not an exhaustive list of vocabulary, but only less common or difficult words. The reader will need to look up any unfamiliar words in the glossary in the back of the book, if there is one, or in a Latin dictionary. The other notes offer help with grammar and word usage, historical background, literary style, and whatever else the editors judge will help the reader better understand the text.
The Pharr Option
Some books take the concept a little further. The book I recommended to the correspondent I mention above is one of these, Hans Friedrich Mueller’s Caesar: Selections from his Commentarii De Bello Gallico. This is one of a growing number of texts that model themselves on Clyde Pharr’s edition of Books I-VI of Vergil’s Aeneid. I discuss Pharr’s Aeneid itself at length HERE. Pharr’s idea was to make the reading experience as smooth and unencumbered as possible. His book and those that follow his format are like other annotated texts in that they have vocabulary help and grammatical notes on the same page as the text.
Here’s the difference: all words that appear twenty-five times or more in the text are printed in italics. Dictionary entries for all these words are listed on a fold-out sheet in the back of the book. All other words are in the vocabulary help on the same page as the passage. Students can open up the fold-out sheet while they’re reading, and have all the vocabulary in front of them. They don’t need to break their rhythm with all sorts of page turning. It’s all right there.
The Deluxe Online Option
Now, as you can see in the pictures above, books of this sort can only devote so much space to the Latin text itself. If you’re looking for a complete version of a fairly long work such as Caesar’s Commentaries on the War in Gaul, you won’t find it here. Mueller’s book, for instance, contains only those Latin passages that have been in the AP Latin curriculum for the past dozen years. His book does, at least, include English translations of the other sections. And, to be fair, the AP selections alone still give you a lot of Latin to work with.
Now, we are living in the digital age, and books are not the only way to read Latin literature. I already mentioned The Latin Library (thelatinlibrary.com) in my discussion of plain text versions of Caesar and other authors. At the other end of the spectrum, we have the Dickinson College Commentaries. This site, as explained on its homepage, offers “Latin and Greek texts for reading, with explanatory notes, essays, vocabulary, and graphic, video, and audio elements.” Let’s take a closer look at what that rather matter-of-fact description entails.
Extraordinary Resources
First of all, the Dickinson site contains a limited number of selections from only thirteen Latin authors, but it’s a very well-chosen thirteen. There are Golden Age authors such as Caesar, Vergil, and Cicero, as we would expect. Tacitus and Seneca represent the Silver Age. We also find less common later Latin authors: St. Jerome from the 5th century AD and The Voyage of St. Brendan from c. the 11th century. The most recent author is the Spanish poet Luisa Sigea de Velasco, who was writing less than 500 years ago (which is practically yesterday, as Latin literature goes).
The Dickinson College Commentaries make up for the limited (but diverse) selection of readings by providing some extraordinary resources. In addition to the usual notes and vocabulary, Dickinson takes advantage of its online format to provide images, maps, audio versions of the text, explanatory videos, and so on. I’m posting a brief video here showing just some of the resources available in the Caesar and Vergil Sections. I plan to publish a more comprehensive discussion and review of the Dickinson site in the near future.
The Best Kind of Book for Latin Literature
We started with the question, “what’s the best kind of book for reading Latin literature?” The answer depends on the needs and preferences of the individual reader. Fortunately, there are more varied resources for readers of Latin literature than ever before. From the bare Latin text, to the full Pharr-style with notes and fold-out sheets, to media laden websites, there’s something for everyone. The best kind of book is the one that best brings Mater Lingarum to life for you.
Featured image top of page: detail from Neaera Reading a Letter from Catullus, by Henry John Hudson, c. 1894.
