No one need feel obliged to answer this, but I’m curious where the intermediate readers on here are getting their (reading) material, particularly those who have finished grammars and are studying on their own, whether in a directed or desultory fashion. I’ve been reading .pdfs from Google pretty exclusively, finding books either on my own, through a couple of bibliographies of free Classics books that can be found here and there on the web or by following the lists in certain books themselves, searching e.g. “College Latin Series” or titles. The current crop of books directed at college students seems to leave a lot to be desired; since they’re aimed at college students they also come loaded with today’s faddish textual politics, not a lick of which is to be found in Allen & Greenough’s Livy or Kelsey’s Caesar, etc. My library of .pdfs is at something like 200 books, which I say only to indicate what’s out there and give the results of some diligent searching. (There are very few Loebs in there; they are instead mostly annotated.)
Edit: Certain lesser/minor authors, e.g. a Valerius Maximus or a Velleius Paterculus simply can’t be found at present, or even apparently an entire Life by Suetonius, another source of irritation with present editions.
This web-site is a huge index of neo-latin texts (about 50,000 entries). It is well worth having a look at. It does have the problem, though, that searching for something specific is difficult because it does not have a dedicated search function. I tried (and am trying) to convert the html pages to a proper index, but that is not quite that easy because the formatting is inconsistent and rather shoddy.
Still, this site is a real treasture trove, and one can find almost any subject in it. As far as difficulty is concerned, many neo-latin texts (but certainly not all) seem more “accessible” than the classical authors.
The inclusion of too much “criticism and theory,” neither of which have any claim to be so called any longer, at the expense of the inclusion of substantive historical and grammatical insight. Editions of Catullus are especially rife with it, with too much projection, subserved by wishful thinking and a dubious ingenuity, resting on too little available knowledge. To be fair, though, at least they’re no longer bowdlerized.
I was particularly struck by Greenough’s (I believe it was Greenough’s, in the main) casual brilliance in the notes to his Livy I & II. Certain annotators of Cicero, too, once seemed to have his entire works, by passage, imprinted on their memories. It hardly seems worth denying times have changed, but of course I have no wish to be combative.
EDIT: Oops: Thanks to those who have provided links. I will certainly sift and explore them. I was hoping for one or two comments from those still starting out, but, alas.
I don’t quite get the question: if I’m reading correctly, you’re asking intermediate students (of which I am one) where they’re getting their texts? I have a couple of Loebs; besides those I have several student editions, and I found them all on Amazon. Currently I’m working on Livy XXI and I’ve been using a separate translation along with it (I don’t remember the translator’s name off the top of my head; the book is in the other room).
A related question: book XXII of Livy (Bristol Classical Press) came today and just judging from a quick glance it looks to be aimed at a lower reading level than book XXI (same publishing house). In fact, book XXII seems to be a facsimile of an older, perhaps turn-of-the-century edition, looking and functioning about the same as my (Bolchazy-Carducci) edition of De Senectute (but, alas, without a vocabulary in the back; looks like I’ll have to be memorizing vocab again. Not a big deal, I guess). Have you been able to find an online repository of these old texts? (Textkit at least used to have texts available for download but I tried downloading a book a while back and it seems that they’re all offline and that the site is basically a front-door for the forums). Do you know where they’re available in hard copies, I guess I should ask, as Amazon listings are unreliable and uninformative? I really dislike reading texts off a screen. Thanks.
Ed: the classicsindex.wikispaces.com site looks very promising. I guess I can just find a good edition there and look it up on AbeBooks for a physical copy. Unfortunately even there the supply is somewhat limited: the only books of Livy available (for example; the selection of Cicero is similarly sparse) are nos. 1-3, 9, and 21-22, which is about what is covered by the student editions available on Amazon. I guess if you can’t find a good book there it would be hard to find anywhere, and I may as well just order the Loeb if I ever want to read them?
A related question: book XXII of Livy (Bristol Classical Press) came today and just judging from a quick glance it looks to be aimed at a lower reading level than book XXI (same publishing house). In fact, book XXII seems to be a facsimile of an older, perhaps turn-of-the-century edition, looking and functioning about the same as my (Bolchazy-Carducci) edition of De Senectute (but, alas, without a vocabulary in the back; looks like I’ll have to be memorizing vocab again. Not a big deal, I guess). Have you been able to find an online repository of these old texts? (Textkit at least used to have texts available for download but I tried downloading a book a while back and it seems that they’re all offline and that the site is basically a front-door for the forums). Do you know where they’re available in hard copies, I guess I should ask, as Amazon listings are unreliable and uninformative? I really dislike reading texts off a screen. Thanks.
Some of then are delphini editions, aimed at students. The explanations are in latin, I have to say, though.
Hard copies can be found also at bookfinder.com. A brief search with the keyword livius gave me a few options, even older texts.
I too dislike reading off a screen, so I just buy the loeb and then if any difficulty or any curiosity appears I check one of the many older, online editions with commentaries and explanations.
I don’t want to be combative, either, but I think it’s unwise to dismiss more recent efforts to illuminate Latin texts.
The older textbooks–those aimed at the college level, at least–are not bad for helping with grammar, although of course grammatical information in Allen & Greenough’s Livy will reflect their own plodding and superannuated grammar). The wealth of parallels that these texts provide is are largely based on the comprehensive German grammars, I think, and on accumulations of parallel passages in a tradition of scholarship that goes back to the 16th and 17 centuries.
What late 19th and early 20th century commentaries, of necessity, don’t offer are the insights achieved by the extensive historical scholarship that has taken place since then. Enormous strides have taken place in understanding the political background to Cicero’s speeches (or in illuminating how little we understand, in contrast to the confidence of the earlier era), for example, and this scholarship doesn’t always show Cicero in a favorable light or his adversaries in quite as unfavorable light as he tries to shine on them.
This is perhaps not so much of a deficiency in the case of the first two books of Livy, which are essentially mythology enlivened by Livy’s talent for embroidery.
As for Catullus, there has been a lot of work since Merrill on the text itself, which is not well preserved, and on Roman literary history and Catullus’ place in it. All of this can enhance your appreciation of the poems. As for “projection, subserved by wishful thinking and a dubious ingenuity, resting on too little available knowledge,” the Lesbia mystery has been a topic of fantasy since the Renaissance. What else do you have in mind?
Qimmik, I’m curious what the methodology is behind this. How did we acquire a greater understanding of the political background? Were there archaeological finds or textual finds? I’m genuinely interested. And couldn’t it be said that you express a confidence in ‘how little we understand’ that is just like the ‘confidence of the earlier era’ except that you have a confidence of our ignorance whereas they had a confidence of our knowledge? I’m not trying to make this a debate, but I am myself somewhat skeptical of modern text criticism, although I do believe it has value. Things like the “Jesus Seminar” and the documentary hypothesis for the OT (which has pretty much fallen apart as the critical scholars have no consensus anymore) have left me skeptical of the entire endeavor.
For one thing, especially in the earlier part of the 20th century there was a lot of work done on prosopography–gathering all the evidence about specific individuals from all sources, literary as well as epigraphic, which allowed scholars to trace individual career patterns, personal alliances and enmities, etc. In addition there have been large-scale synthesizing works such as Syme’s Roman Revolution. The late 19th century historians tended to see Roman politics in terms of modern political parties, whereas the contemporary view sees Roman politics in terms of individuals vying for power and influence. The same is true of Athenian politics in the 5th and 4th centuries. There is a greater tendency to be skeptical of literary sources and to attempt to see their biases. More attention is paid to social and economic issues, and there is a recognition that the literary sources don’t illuminate these areas very well. Tacitus, for example, has come to be seen as having a somewhat narrow perspective–an historian of elite palace intrigues (well, maybe that’s a little too harsh) writing from the perspective of the senatorial class, who didn’t grapple with the larger issues facing the empire. Cicero has come to be seen as a somewhat bumbling and hypocritical minor player in the political turbulence of the transitional period between the Republic and the Empire, and the late Republic as a free-for-all among ruthless predators. Augustus is regarded as both the benevolent leader who brought order out of chaos and a ruthless military dictator. Not everyone would agree with all of this, and perhaps it’s a bit overstated, but the contemporary perspective on these things is quite different from 100 to 150 years ago, when the older out-of-copyright editions were produced. This is the product of both a skeptical reading of the literary texts, archaeology independent of literary texts, epigrapy, etc. It’s simply the advancement of knowledge over time.
I am myself somewhat skeptical of modern text criticism,
Are you talking about textual criticism? I think the study of Biblical texts raises completely different issues, though I don’t know much about it.
Ok, thanks for the reply Qimmik. And yes, my main experience has been with biblical textual criticism, which it seems is quite a different animal. Biblical textual criticism has attracted some who are bent on finding a “gotcha” to squash the traditional religious views, and that has hurt the credibility of the field in my view.
“Textual criticism” usually refers to the comparison of different manuscripts and other sources of a specific work and and the attempt to produce a text that is close to the original. That’s a necessary enterprise for both biblical and classical texts because the texts have come down through a more or less imperfect process of transmission by manuscripts that has necessarily introduced many errors in the texts. I think that’s somewhat different from what you’re referring to.
In the classical field, there have been advances in the textual criticism of numerous authors in the last 125 years. The individual histories of specific texts through antiquity and the middle ages have been studied in detail. In particular, there is a greater awareness of the extent to which medieval copyists incorporated readings from more than just one manuscript in their copies, leading to a different understanding of the interrelationships among various mss. and less reliance in many texts on the “stemmatic” method, which involves eliminating mss. believed to be derived from other existing mss. from consideration. Also, I think many of the 19th century and earlier editors knew Greek and Latin so well that they thought they knew the languages better than the authors themselves, and tended to make “corrections” based on what they perceived as incorrect usage, or in some cases on theories about, e.g., hiatus and prose rhythms. So many of the school texts from that period perpetuate these aggressive editorial practices.
Specific texts have been illuminated by advances in scholarship over the years. The Homeric poems are a key example of this–the understanding of the oral nature of the tradition in which these poems were composed has completely revolutionized the study of the poems. This was worked into a coherent theory in the 1920s but didn’t begin to sink in until around mid-century. We also have a much better understanding of Latin literary history today, which illuminates the works of the classical poets of the late Republic/early Empire: Catullus, Vergil, Propertius, Horace and eventually Ovid.
And particularly on the Greek side, an amazing amount of previously lost literary (as well as non-literary) material has been recovered in papyri since 1900.
So those are some of the reasons why in many cases the school and college editions of the late 19th/early 20th centuries have been superseded by more modern editions. But some of the older editions still have a lot of value, particularly for students at an intermediate level–Page’s Vergil, for example. The Macmillan series, in my view, have aged quite well. Merrill’s Catullus is another example, although he leaves out the good stuff.
However, I don’t think it’s in anyone’s interest to deprecate newer editions that incorporate modern scholarship. Classical scholarship has actually made much progress in the last century, just as it has in all centuries since the Renaissance.
I may edit or just post again when I have more time. I despaired somewhat of more replies.
I appreciate swtwentyman’s response, which was closer to what I was wondering - whether people are using Loebs, perhaps, but especially to what extent they are using e.g., the Bristol Classics books, Bolchazzy-Carducci, perhaps the Oklahoma press, etc., and how satisfied they were with them.
Qimnik I appreciate your replies and thank you for distinguishing between textual criticism and literary or historical criticism. I meant the latter but I was vague and apologize for that. Ciraolo’s Pro Caelio continues the trend of assigning Catullan traditions to the Clodia Pulcher of the trial. For this reason and similar I haven’t read many of these more recent editions and am sticking to the older books for now. Another reason is that, frankly, the former mastery of the context has it seems actually largely disappeared and for many recent annotators it is narrower, not broader. (Also, a superannuated grammar is no bad thing ipso facto, by the way, and I greatly prefer Allen & Greenough’s Revised Edition to anything currently in print. It’s also correct for the period books & the ‘New’ isn’t.) If you want an interpretative upending, here’s one: “Dr Skidmore [in Practical Ethics for Roman Gentlemen] argues that modern scholarship’s view of Valerius’ [Maximus’] work as a mere source-book for rhetoricians is misconceived.” To me it sounds like new discoveries have by necessity dried up and there is an excess of industry in search of a reinvention of the perfectly serviceable, correct wheel. Samuel Dill covered excellently how such rhetorical commonplaces resulted in the gross literary decadence of the fourth and fifth centuries. I have no idea what Skidmore’s ingenuity could have ‘discovered.’
I use the Loeb Classical Library books most of the time. When I tire of one author, I buy another book from Amazon. I read mostly the standard authors from the classical period. I usually read seated on a sofa, with dictionaries, grammar, and so on, in a pile on my left side.
When I want to work with my computer, I use the Perseus Digital Library.
Sometimes when I want to see how I’m doing with no translation handy, I use the LatinLibrary online texts.