Viri Romae

Textkit Community Open Board
1

[I have also posted this on the D’Ooge forum, but I haven’t had a response to the question of how I make this book available.]

I have recently been culling books from my library and I ran across an old school text that I picked up about ten years ago. It is a 1905 edition of D’Ooge’s Viri Romae. This is D’Ooge’s shorthand for a book known in Europe as Selections from Urbis Romae Viri Inlustres. Apparently, it was in use from the mid-Eighteenth century until the beginning of the last as a bridge between second-year Latin and the reading of Caesar. D’Ooge re-worked the book for “modern” students.

I have not seen this book on the Textkit archives. Is there any interest in uploading it to the site? It covers early Roman history (Monarchy up to Augustus) through the lives of great Roman men. It also has composition exercises as well as a full glossary.

My copy is fairly clean. Most of the notations are in the exercise area of the book and seem to be instructions for which exercises were to be assigned. There is very little in the way of completed answers to the exercises.

What is the process for making this text available? I know that there was an earlier discussion in the D’Ooge group on next steps after completing his Beginner’s Latin. This book seems to fill that gap.

What do any of you think?

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I think only Jeff can answer your specific question about having textkit host the book, but you may also want to consider another route – getting it into Project Gutenberg. They just released (with the help of Jeff) D’Ooge’s Latin for Beginners in pure text and html (much more useful and portable than pdf scans).

If you have any interest, the usual route is to go through the Distributed Proofreaders’ part of Project Gutenberg. They do the incredibly painful job of going through each page (several times) to make sure that the images have been correctly translated into actual text.

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I think this book is useful, and I prefer a .pdf file, which preserves the format of a one-hundred-year-old book.
I think many of the members here would also like to see it.
As to how to make it, the best way is to ask Jeff. You can of course find what Jeff suggests in his previous replies in this forum.

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This book exists in pdf form on Google Books. It’s about a 5.7 MB download.