WHAT IS THIS BOOK?
This book is a grammar-based introduction to the Latin language which doubles as an introduction to Roman literature and society. It differs in several important respects from other common Latin textbooks. The most significant difference is that it exists primarily as a Microsoft Word document. Its status as such has several implications. It can be distributed at no cost; anyone can revise or rewrite parts of it to suit their own needs; and it can easily be manipulated in a classroom setting on a projector, or over a remote platform. Those who prefer a physical text can still have it printed and bound at a reasonable cost.
Another distinctive feature of this book is that it is written as a didactic novel. It is structured as a series of 36 time-travel adventures into the world of ancient Rome. Its main character is a figure, Latinitas, who was inspired by Lady Philosophy in Boethius’ Consolation of Philosophy; her instruction touches on history, philosophy, and literature, but focuses primarily on Latin grammar. It features a narrator, of undefined gender, who is a composite, more or less, of all the students I have ever taught. It even has a plot (albeit a rather jejune one) involving the meaning of a Latin phrase the narrator hears in a vision at the start of the story.
Some of the ways in which it presents Latin grammar are worth noting at the outset. For instance, I have replaced the terms 1st, 2nd, 3rd, 4th, and 3rd-io Conjugation with what I feel are the more descriptive labels A-Verbs, E-Verbs, I-Verbs, Long I-Verbs, and Mixed I-Verbs. So-called 1st, 2nd, 3rd, 4th, and 5th Declension Nouns have become A-Nouns, UO-Nouns, EI-Nouns, U- Nouns, and E-Nouns. I present the noun cases in an order which in the nineteenth-century was not uncommon, Nominative, Accusative, Genitive, Dative, and Ablative; this order allows endings with identical spellings to be juxtaposed in the sequence more often. In general I have been sparing with minor grammatical rules, assuming that students can learn about things like the genitive of price in their intermediate courses. The vocabulary to be memorized is limited to about 20 new words per chapter, most drawn from lists of the 1,000 or so most common Latin words.
This is a textbook written for adults. I advert to matters of sexuality and violence at various junctures and present them in a fairly forthright manner. Enslaved persons make frequent
appearances in the narrative, sometimes as anonymous figures working in the background, sometimes as featured authors. I have tried to evoke some of the sensations of weirdness and disorientation that travel to a foreign place can entail. The comic and the tragic frequently rub elbows, just as they do in real life.
DIRECTIONS FOR USE BY INDIVIDUAL LEARNERS
If you intend to use this book to learn Latin, first acquire a notebook. Divide it into three sections, of at least 75 pages each. Label the first one ‘Grammar and Forms’, the second ‘Compositions’, the third, ‘Vocabulary’. As you read, you will come upon names and terms marked in boldface; copy these into ‘Grammar and Forms’, and provide a definition, either writing out the text or putting it in your own words.
When you encounter the name of an ancient author in boldface, like Plautus or Cato Maior, write down some details that will help you remember who they are.
When you encounter material in the text that is in boldface or indented or followed by numbers or letters in superscript – items that look like the following sentences – please add them to your notebook:
Words in the narrative in boldface go in ‘Grammar and Forms’, along with their definitions. Text in the narrative with superscript letters (A) or in ITALICIZED ALL CAPS also goes in ‘Grammar and Forms’.
Indented text in blue type, with superscript numbers, goes in ‘Compositions’. (2)
Indented words in boldface followed by a big spacego in ‘Vocabulary’.
It is a good idea to alphabetize your vocabulary, which means lettering the pages in advance. Different letters will require different numbers of pages. If you reserve 65 pages for vocabulary, each letter should be given the following number of pages:
A 7, B 1, C 8, D 4, E 3, F 2, G 1, H 1, I 5, K 1, L 3, M 3, N 1, O 2, P 7, Q 1, R 3, S 6, T 3, U
1, V 1, XYZ 1
For more on the importance of keeping a notebook, see the introduction to the book, the Vade Mecum.
CLASSROOM USE: ONE METHOD
This book was originally written for use at Brooklyn College in the courses Latin 1 and Latin 2, which fill the college’s language requirement and are also a prerequisite for the major. The class meets in 75-minute sessions twice a week for 14 weeks, followed by a final day. During the initial trial-run for the book we aimed to cover most of the material in chapters I–XVIII, plus the Vade Mecum.
The material in Vade Mecum was presented on the first day of class. After that we followed a cycle of New Chapter, New Chapter, and Review Day (which I called Lusus).
On the days that we covered new chapters, students were required to take notes on the grammar, enter the new vocabulary into the vocabulary section of their notebooks, and translate about 15 of the approximately 20 sentences in each chapter for homework. They were to take photos of their sentences and submit them to me before each class began. During each class, we would first go over the new vocabulary, with comment on grammar and English derivatives. Next we would play Pictionary with the vocabulary briefly using pictures the students drew. After that we would go over the new forms and grammar with examples, then do an exercise where they would be shown a set of Latin words, declined or conjugated, and asked to identify them. (For some reason this exercise was, like Pictionary, very popular.)
In the last 25 minutes of class we would carefully go over the sentences for translation. The students had already submitted photos of their initial translation sentences; when we went over them, they were to correct any mistakes they had made, to make sure that their notebooks contained perfectly correct translations. The incentive for attention to the corrections was that one-half of the Midterm (which was open-book and open-notebook) involved translating a selection of these blue sentences. The same sentences were presented on the exam, but with the direction of translation reversed, i.e. English to Latin became Latin to English. The idea is that if the students paid careful attention during the daily work, it would be easy for them to get an A on the Midterm. The other half of the Midterm covered the reproduction of forms – declensions and conjugations, in the traditional manner. The Final Exam was just like the Midterm, but covered material from the entire course.
On Lusus days students were required to do translations of the ~10 sentences from the two chapters that we had not gone over yet. We would go over at least some of the authentic text selections on this day at the end of class. The first half of class was devoted to grammar review, the word-form recognition game, and any items of grammar that we did not cover on the previous two days. As part of their homework for the day, students also had to submit a voice recording of them reading aloud one of the authentic Latin passages from the previous two chapters.
Finally, at the end of the semester students were required to show me that they had completed their notetaking for individual chapters and their vocabulary.
There is no need to use the text in the same way I did. HOW TO ALTER THE TEXT
This text is being released with a Creative Commons license that allows users to modify its contents as they see fit, provided that credit is given to myself as the original author, and that all subsequent uses of the text remain non-commercial. Thus, whether you are a teacher or a learner, you should feel free to modify the text. Unclear explanations can be made more clear; unhelpful translation sentences can be made more helpful; bad jokes can be replaced with funny ones. Speakers of British English may wish to restore the u’s to ‘color’ and suchlike. Chapters can be expanded or, within certain limits, shortened. Images can be added and the formatting of the text changed. You may replace my A-Verb and A-Noun terminology with the more common 1st Conjugation and 1st Declension jargon, if you wish.
A few caveats need to be made, however. The order of noun cases cannot be altered unless one is willing to rewrite the first quarter or so of the textbook from the ground up. Moving the introduction of new grammar rules to earlier or later chapters is possible in theory but would likewise require a great deal of rewriting. One can replace the literary excepts I have provided with other ones, but bear in mind that the vocabulary in each chapter was selected with an eye to its being encountered in the readings; also, the storyline of each chapter often interacts with the narrative of the texts in an essential way. I would advise against making major changes of this sort until one has gone through the whole textbook carefully a few times.
If you wish to share a Modified version of this text with students or colleagues, please indicate your name and the date of the revision on the title page. This will prevent confusion if different versions of this text end up being circulated on the internet.
HOW TO INSTALL IMAGES
There is a blank page between each chapter, which can be left blank, cut, or used as a place to insert images. Simply click on the page, click ‘Insert Picture’ from the bar, and choose an image file that you like. Once you have done so, right click on the image and select ‘Wrap Text Tight’; you can then move the image around and resize it to taste. The same method can also be used to insert images into the text of each chapter. Bear in mind that adding large number of images can cause the file for the book to become very large, 50MB or more – too large to send as an email attachment, for example. Caption your images.
Always give credit to the source by filling out the relevant section of Image Credits at the end of the book, or in the caption.
Only use images that you have permission to use. On Google you can find such images by searching for e.g. ‘Rome’, then clicking on ‘Tools’, then ‘Usage Rights’, and then ‘Creative Commons licenses’. Wikipedia is an excellent source for illustrations, since, as a general rule, all the images in its articles are available under a Creative Commons license.
PAGINATION
Teachers would be well advised to share a PDF version of the text with students and to refer to the page numbers in that document throughout the semester. This is because even minor modifications to the Word file can alter the pagination and create confusion. When I teach a chapter in class, I often copy the text into a ‘dummy’ file which I can alter and manipulate freely, and later save, to create a record of what we did in class.
If you click on the page numbers in the Table of Contents of this text, the action should take you to the first page of the chapter in question. This feature only works in the Word document version.
LEARNING GOALS
One aim of this book is to introduce students to the history of late Republican and Imperial Rome through a series of vignettes that allude to or introduce famous historical actors and explicate some of the reasons for their fame or infamy.
A second aim for the book is sketch out the social and cultural history of the Roman world, which it does by describing the ordinary people and places that the narrator encounters during each time-travel visit.
A third aim is to provide students with a mental thumbnail portrait of some well-known (and a few less well-known) Latin writers, and a sense of the subjects they wrote about, based on reading bits of representative texts.
As for language learning, the main goal here is to provide students with what I call ‘Loeb literacy’ (or ‘Budé literacy, for those in the francophone world). After completing the book, students should be able to recognize the Latin roots of many English words and understand how core elements of Latin grammar work. In addition, they should be able to look at a Loeb translation and see how the Latin on the left-hand page corresponds to the English on the right; they
should also know how to use a dictionary and possess most of the basic skills required for independent translation. Students who choose not to study Latin further will thus have had some experience reading notable authors in the original. Those who go on to further study will be able to build on this foundation by expanding their vocabulary and studying individual authors in greater depth. Both groups of students will also have learned many striking things about Roman culture, history, politics, and literature from the little narratives in each Explōrātiō that, hopefully, will linger in the mind for a long time.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
I would like to extend my deep thanks to Niles Marthone for going over the opening chapters of this book with great care and helping to get this project off the ground; Niles also compiled the English-to-Latin vocabulary list. Equally deep thanks go to Carly Zerbe, who compiled a list of common errors students were making in their translations of sentences and offered many invaluable suggestions for improving the presentation of the book, with an eye to making it easier for students to get their translations right the first time. In addition, Diana Zheng created a version of this book with much-improved formatting while working with me as part of Brooklyn College’s Mellon Transfer Student Research Program.
I am very grateful to those students who took Latin 1 and 2 with me during the first years of the Covid pandemic, 2020/2021, and 2021/2022, and made use of this textbook. Special thanks go to those who gave me ideas for improvements or uncovered typos or errors, especially Daniela Alba, Victoria Factor, Vasile Gologez, Natalie Hernandez, Casey Markus, Ari Pewzner, Kyle Aaron Reese, Patrick Boyd Richardson, and Una Smithsimon.
From the beginning my colleagues at Brooklyn College had a faith in the viability of this experiment for which I am profoundly grateful. I would offer special thanks to my fellow instructors Sebastian Anderson and Brian Sowers, who test-drove this book in the second year of its existence with their own Latin students and gave me many helpful ideas for changes.
Finally, I would like to recognize my partner Jill Kelly, a brilliant teacher who I was fortunate enough to be able to discuss various pedagogical conundrums with while we took our evening walks around the neighborhood.
Philip Thibodeau Classics Department Brooklyn College
City University of New York
There are words addressed to our condition, which, if we could hear and understand them, would be more salutary to our lives than the dawn.
(H. D. Thoreau, approximately)
