Hello all.
I’m attempting to teach myself Latin, and one of my main interests is to read the works of the ancient authors. Problem is, I can’t find any books of their works (that are actually in Latin, and not translations), and I don’t like reading off of the internet; I would much rather have a portable copy. Does anyone know where I might order copies?
Ebay is a pretty good place to look in my opinion.
You can also just print online copies of most authors’ works. The ink cost can get expensive if you do that with the larger works though.
I’ve bought some 11 Latin books off Ebay - most in groups for less than $20 US.
For D’Ooge’s book and Collar & Daniell’s - both available as downloads from Textkit - I just print a few chapters at a time for study.
That’s pretty much the whole problem. I don’t want to have to waste ink printing off huge parts of something like the Aeneid all at once. Ebay is kind of nice, perhaps I’ll look there a bit. Still, it would be nicer to know somewhere where I know what I’m looking for will be for sale.
Where do you live? I presume you don’t live in a large city and don’t have access to a good second hand book store (which is where I get my Latin books). There are some firms still publishing and it would be worthwhile to look up “Bristol Classic Press” and Loeb on the internet, find out which authors you would like to read and then do some more searching for those books (use the ISBN number). I haven’t tried Ebay for a while and I must admit it was fairly disappointing when I did try. Maybe it has changed? I found Amazon has a better range of 2nd hand books on offer.
Okay, after looking around, I’ve decided that the Aeneid and Metamorphoses look the most interesting to me. I’ve already decided what copies of the Aeneid I’m going to buy (from amazon), but I’m still having trouble finding a nice printed copy of Metamorphoses. The Loeb edition is okay, I guess, but I tend to get distracted when the opposite page is the translation. Does anyone know an edition that I might like?
There is a three volume set by Anderson of the Metamorphoses, however, the notes are rather lacking in grammar and vocabulary help, except in the most extreme cases. They are, however, entirely Latin, followed by the notes after all the Latin text.