Texts with free (e.g. out-of-copyright) online commentaries?

Latin Learning Latin
1

Can anyone point me to some Latin texts for which there are available freely downloadable editions that incorporate vocabularies, grammatical notes, etc.?

I mean things like the Livy and Terence textbooks in the TextKit library, which are free because they’re out of copyright, or the equally old Completely Parsed Cicero at https://books.google.com/books/about/Completely_Parsed_Cicero.html?id=SixKvaKeDpoC.

I’m choosing a text to read with a class of intermediate students, and want to find one that they can access for free and which will have the kind of vocabulary and grammatical information that they will find helpful. Thanks in advance for any pointers.

2

There was a thread about this kind of thing a little while back; unfortunately I don’t remember any more specifically than that or what ot was called. Google Books has that kind of thing, I believe. But I went through the Catilinarians with this text with notes:

http://www.uah.edu/student_life/organizations/SAL/texts/latin/classical/cicero/incatilinam1.html
http://www.uah.edu/student_life/organizations/SAL/texts/latin/classical/cicero/incatilinam1com.html

I hope that helps, if only a bit. (Links to the other orations can be found at the bottom of the pages. There are other texts hosted on that site but most don’t have notes/commentary – the Pro Archia does)

Here is the Consolation of Philosophy:

http://faculty.georgetown.edu/jod/boethius/jkok/list_t.htm

From that same site, the Confessions of Augustine:

http://faculty.georgetown.edu/jod/conf/noframe_entry.html

3

Whenever I google an exact quotation from a Latin classic, google usually dredges up old texts with commentaries.

http://tinyurl.com/ofr3wx4

For example, this tinyurl points to a google search on “quos curriculo pulverem” points to a search on a phrase from Horace, Odes, book 1, ode 1. If you look through the search results you’ll find 19th century texts with commentaries.

4

This is the truth. I often google a random phrase or line that I have questions about, and if you do this and look in Google Books you’ll find all sorts of older texts. A quick glance at the pages can usually tell you if they have the kind of apparatus you’re looking for.