Book after Caesar?

[swtwentyman]

.

[thesaurus]

I would recommend some of Cicero's philosophical writings. Unless you find them too boring for you, you should find that they are more straightforward than his orations because there are fewer rhetorical flourishes.

De Amicitia and De senectute are pleasant and probably accessible at your level. As you've been doing, don't be afraid to reread passages multiple times.

[Shenoute]

Caesar's Civil War ?

[Qimmik]

Cicero's speeches against Catiline, especially the first one (which starts with one of the most famous sentences in Latin), might be a good text to work on after Caesar. You can find plenty of older used editions aimed at students and there's a more recent edition in the Cambridge Greek and Latin Classics ("Green and Yellow") series.

At some point, you might want to take a stab at poetry. This book looks like a useful introduction to poetry and to Ovid, and inexpensive used copies are available on line through ABE Books.

http://www.amazon.com/Selections-Ovid-V ... 1585100889

Another text to begin reading poetry might be Vergil's Eclogues (Bucolics). An old but good school edition of the Bucolics and Georgics or the Bucolics alone by T.E. Page can be found modest prices.

[swtwentyman]

Thanks for the recommendations. I went ahead and ordered the Loeb volume of Senectute/Amicitia/Divination because it contained both of thesaurus' works and at this point, the fewer flights of rhetoric the better.

What are the student editions like? I don't want excerpts and the lack of a translation puts me off a bit but if they're like the Wheelock's Reader (glosses on facing pages with some thornier bits of grammar; there is no translation given) I may want to take a look at them. But again, I'd rather read the work in full as originally written, even if it means having to read the translation for the particularly tricky bits.

[Damoetas]

That sounds good - I second the recommendation of De Senectute and De Amicitia.

Student editions at this level don't contain excerpts or abridgments. They contain the actual text, a commentary at the back (designed to explain grammar and difficult vocabulary, rather than to give very "scholarly" information), and sometimes a list of all the vocabulary that occurs in the text. So that makes them very helpful. What they usually lack is a detailed textual apparatus (i.e. list of variants), because you don't need to be focusing on such things at this stage.

Like anything, not all student editions are equally helpful. For instance, some of them are too interested in providing literary parallels (from Latin literature, or even Victorian English literature! which I find very unhelpful). But anyway, try several until you find one that's beneficial and at the right level for you.

Thanks for the recommendations. I went ahead and ordered the Loeb volume of Senectute/Amicitia/Divination because it contained both of thesaurus' works and at this point, the fewer flights of rhetoric the better.

What are the student editions like? I don't want excerpts and the lack of a translation puts me off a bit but if they're like the Wheelock's Reader (glosses on facing pages with some thornier bits of grammar; there is no translation given) I may want to take a look at them. But again, I'd rather read the work in full as originally written, even if it means having to read the translation for the particularly tricky bits.

[Barry Hofstetter]

Excellent suggestions. I also like the Pro Archia. While it has some rhetorical flourish, It has a lot of good information about the state of Greek and Latin literature at the time as understood by Cicero, and I personally find that highly interesting.

For my first advanced year Latin students (Caesar is intermediate) I usually read in the first semester The First Catilinarian, and the second semester selections from Ovid's Metamorphoses. I do Ovid in part because the next year they'll be reading Vergil, and I find Ovid a gentler introduction to hexameter (he tends to be quite a bit more "regular" than Vergil), but also because so many of the stories are inherently fun and attractive (I usually start with Pyramus and Thisbe, teenage love tragedy and all that). Also, if you re-write the stories in prose, but keeping Ovid's syntax and vocabulary, the Latin turns out to be comparatively easy, so that if you are interested in moving on to poetry, that might be the place to start.

[Qimmik]

Barry, what textbooks do you use for In Cat. 1 and selections from Ovid?

[Barry Hofstetter]

Barry, what textbooks do you use for In Cat. 1 and selections from Ovid?

Cicero's First Catilinarian Oration, with Introduction, Running Vocabularies and Notes Paperback – June 1, 1997, by Karl Frerichs (Author), Robert W. Cape (Foreword) http://tinyurl.com/mxuktun

Love & Transformation: an Ovid Reader (English and Latin Edition) Paperback – June 18, 1998
by Ovid (Author), Richard A. LaFleur (Author) http://tinyurl.com/kzx3zjc

[Qimmik]

Thanks, Barry.

It looks like the Ovid text doesn't include Phaeton, which is one of my favorites, but it's not a story of love and the metamorphosis is tacked on at the end as a pretext for telling the story.