I can’t speak for Latin, but for Greek, quantity is up while quality is (far) down.
I suppose it depends over what time period you are talking about. The late Martin West produced some of the finest greek commentaries we have ever seen. Nagy produces stunning work - see The best of the Achaeans. Finglass of the younger generation has produced exemplary commentaries on Ajax and Electra and Pindar.
All commentaries rely on previous work thats how scholarship works.
I thought the exchanges about the Brill dictionary were rather superficial. Good knockabout fun but scarcely an academic exchange. Time will tell how useful it is as a working dictionary.
I am sure a lot of papers are written that are not very good, it was ever thus. As an undergraduate I was very disappointed in a number of commentaries. I didnt find Davies on Trachiniae as helpful as Easterling.
I am not judging contemporary classics by the quantity of paper produced. But the idea that the work done nowadays is no match for the past is factually incorrect and merely another version of the golden age trope.
Could anyone inform me of how to use the Old Breviary? Was there a Lectio Altera as the new Liturgy of the Hours in the old Breviary? I find the old one too complicated at times…
Sorry to be tangential to the original post. I just want to know how the term ‘quality’ is defined. Could anyone share his observation regarding the latest development in Latin and Greek LITERATURE research?
By the way, the Handbook of Classical Research by Routledge (Brill? Forgotten which publisher but it must be this kind of big name) mentioned that research on the style of Ciceronian Rhetoric receives less attention than it deserves. Is this true?
It appears to me that Oxford Classical Texts and Teubners are churning out at snail speed - Loebs appear to be the foot stop for colossal series of Classics texts.
Another thing I observe in many Latin courses is that teachers often put too much emphasis on poetry than on prose, which makes little sense to me as prose is supposed the convention of a language, which also paves the way for verse literature. I wonder who else, though, one should read for Latin prose, after Caesar, Cicero, Livy, Pliny the Younger, Seneca, or even Tacitus and Sallust. Are these the only Latin prose masters?
As far as the ‘induction’ method is concerned, I think JACT’s Reading Latin has done a pretty bad job. The readings are disorganized, and I don’t know why the editors have included so much Plautus while neglecting other more important readings.
I think there should really a primer for reading Latin instead of grammar itself - how to appreciate the style of writing and integrate prior knowledge on declension, conjugation and sentence construction.
I’ve mentioned before on another thread that the use of poetry for beginners seems very counter-productive. I think teachers do this because prose is seen as boring. They hope to motivate the students with the subject matter. But what is less motivating than not being able to understand what you’re reading? It also seems like a relatively recent innovation. All the older textbooks I’ve seen concentrate on prose, often exclusively on Caesar. I wonder if the use of poetry this way has anything to do with girls being admitted to the study of Latin.
You’ve mentioned the major prose authors, and I would add Nepos, Pliny the Elder (Natural History), and Cato’s de Agricultura. There’s enough there to last a lifetime. Cicero alone will take me many more years, if I ever muster up enough interest for his works on oratory.
I’m not sure what you mean about a primer for reading Latin instead of learning grammar. Isn’t that what all courses do with the Latin readers published for the second year?
Not really. Some older Latin readers that I have seen discourage reading by parsing each line into separated English words. Consequently that would be like translation exercise or English reading.
Another thing I observe in many Latin courses is that teachers often put too much emphasis on poetry than on prose, which makes little sense to me as prose is supposed the convention of a language, which also paves the way for verse literature.
I Think this shows a fundamental misunderstanding of the relationship between prose and poetry in the ancient world. In antiquity the difference between prose and poetry is arguably a question of genre. Although there are differences between poetic and prose diction those differences are not unbridgeable. The idea that prose has some kind of priority over poetry seems entirely misplaced. Prose was written with just as much care for rhythm liveliness and effect as was poetry. As to temporal priority the early Latin authors, or what we have, wrote poetry rather than prose.
EDIT: I am ignoring epigraphic evidence here and I do realise that what we have is an accident of survival.
As far as the ‘induction’ method is concerned, I think JACT’s Reading Latin has done a pretty bad job. The readings are disorganized, and I don’t know why the editors have included so much Plautus while neglecting other more important readings.
Jact reading Latin is a method to teach Latin not a reader as such. The Plautus is so heavily adapted that it is almost unrecognisable. There are so many readers available so there are others for you to to choose from. At school we “read” de bello gallico, more like we had the key passages for the exam drummed into us. JACT seems a more humane experience to me.
