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Is D'Ooge's a Preparation for reading Caesar's Gallic Wars?

Posted: Wed Apr 19, 2006 4:05 pm
by rustymason
Is D'Ooge's designed to be a preparation for reading Caesar's Gallic Wars, or just Caesar in general (pun not intended, but I'll take it)?

Rusticus

Posted: Wed Apr 19, 2006 7:59 pm
by Ulpianus
Dunno. Though Gallic Wars would have been a classic "first text" at the time it was written.

I can't see myself how a preparation for reading Gallic War would not also serve to prepare one for Civil War.

Posted: Thu Apr 20, 2006 4:28 am
by Carola
As it seems to dwell constantly on battles & military things I think it would be a very good preparation! It was fairly common to use the Gallic Wars as the first text to study in Latin for many years and D'Ooge would no doubt have had this in mind when intoducing the vocabulary and other material. It's not like Greek where there are different dialects etc. and Caesar wrote in a nice plain style.

Once you get through the first stages of grammar, see if you can find any brief translation pieces of Caesar in "First Reader" type books, then look around for a good, modern annotated edition of the Gallic Wars and see if you can make some sense of it - even if some parts are beyond you.

Posted: Thu Apr 20, 2006 9:14 am
by Andrus
Hi all,

D’Ooge states in the preface “To make the course preparatory to Caesar…?. So I guess it is aiming to read all Caesar books.

If you are interest in Caesar works I found this two following links by chance:

http://www.perseus.tufts.edu/cgi-bin/pt ... 99.04.0017

That is a book with an introduction to politics, armies and the life of Caesar, followed by annotations for the Gallic war books.

You can also have the all collection of books at:

http://etext.lib.virginia.edu/etcbin/to ... c&part=all

but in English.

Best regards,

Andrus