Reading questions

Latin Learning Latin
1

Hi, I have a question but is not about grammar:

I learned latin almost all by myself and I don’t have the least idea about what one should read in a ‘normal’ class. I started doing what interested me most:Poetry and history. I read 4 books of the metamorphoses,caesar, Cicero in catilina, and Tacitus Germania; a dozen poems of catullus, the first 4 eclogues and a couple odes from horace, more or less.

But I completely skipped livy, plinius,and drama is completely unknown to me. I’m planning to begin Aeneid book 2 with the vocabulary I found in textkit.

Well, what one should ‘normally’ read in a college? Do you read just the most interesting parts or a whole book?Do you read all styles or just the most important ones?Just one book of each author or many? What should one read to be considered at a intermediary or advanced level in latin?

Hope not to overwhelm you with my questions! :smiley: Thanks.

2

I’m not much of an authority on what one should read in the college level of Latin, having only begun to venture into that territory myself. But, judging by what you’ve already read, you’re definitely on the right track. I know that many colleges’ syllabi for a Latin major include the works of the historians (Livy, Pliny, etc.), and in my college-level class I’ve studied the works of Ovid and am currently working on the poems of Catullus.

If you’re able to successfully get through Vergil, Ovid, Catullus, Caesar, Cicero, and other such Roman authors, then I would definitely agree that you’re at the intermediate, if not advanced, level. :slight_smile: