Thirty-eight Latin Stories: 5th edition Designed to Accompany Wheelock's Latin (7th Edition)

This little book of stories in Latin is designed to accompany *Wheelock’s Latin.* However, it would be a pity to limit the use of such an excellent reader to Wheelock’s method alone; it deserves much wider application. Almost any introductory course of Latin, at High School or College level would bene.t from its use. The stories are well chosen for the material they illustrate, interesting in themselves, and carefully graded for vocabulary and grammatical construction. As each one is preceded by a listing of the grammar taught in the accompanying lesson, they are easily adapted to any textbook. But the great value of the book is its avoidance of “made” Latin — that bane of most teaching methods — since every one of the stories is based on real Latin literature, simplified, of course, in the beginning, but less and less so as the work advances. By using this reader, the student will learn how classical Latin was really written, and become painlessly acquainted with the great Latin authors. The little book itself is pleasing in appearance, easy to handle, and possessed of that sober elegance characteristic of Bolchazy-Carducci publications.

Excellent... it improved my students’ reading ability and also gave the opportunity to talk about Roman culture.

This American reader is intended as a supplement to the one-volume Latin course by F.M. Wheelock... The book under review, though, is presumably offered to accompany any Latin course in need of further material. The format is straightforward: each double-page spread contains a passage of continuous prose between twelve and twenty lines long with a selective running vocabulary opposite; there is a complete glossary at the end. There is no reason why this book should not be used on its own: the 'grammar assumed' is indicated clearly at the top of each passage, and the progression is a conventional one. Passages are printed with macra, so that reading aloud could be practiced. The first eighteen stories are ‘made-up’ Latin, for use while linguistic knowledge is fairly rudimentary: the subject matter is mainly Greek mythology. This might well integrate with, or provide the basis for, a topic branching out from a straightforward Latin course. The later passages ... are adapted or rewritten from literature. There is a good deal of Cicero: rhetoric from the ‘Catiline’ orations, philosophical passages from the Brutus and 'De senectute'; the remaining pieces are ‘tasters’ for Caesar, Sallust, Livy and Petronius and even (though transmuted into prose) Terence, Catullus, Virgil, and Horace. Relationship with the originals vary: in the story of Lucretia, about one word in .ve survives from Livy, yet a passage from Sallust consists of authentic sentences only occasionally simpli.ed by omissions. The intention is to enrich the expository chapters of Wheelock’s course, otherwise a rather stodgy diet of grammar, exercises and sententiae antiquae. Each page is attractively laid-out, typefaces are varied and legible, and the whole is rather better advertisement for the new printing technology than some other recent production. Anyone looking for an easy reader to augment a conventional Latin course could well consider this book.”

In its Greek and Latin textbook survey, published in 1984 (Taylor and Lawall, CO 61 [1984]: 108-11), the American Philological Association reported, not surprisingly, that Frederic M. Wheelock’s *Latin: An Introductory Course Based on Ancient Authors* (3rd ed., New York, NY: Barnes and Noble, 1956) was the elementary Latin text by far most widely adopted in American colleges; even less surprising to those who have used the book was the frequently expressed complaint that 'Wheelock lacks connected readings' to accompany each of the chapters. Instructors who have felt the need for a reader with continuous passages to supplement the disconnected sentences in Wheelock (or perhaps even to replace such monstrosities of the grammar/translation method as Puer matrem timebat, quae eum in viam eiciebat!) have resorted to a variety of less than ideal alternatives. Texts that I have used for the purpose include Ritchie’s *Fabulae Faciles* (Longman), Lowe and Freeman’s *Livy: Rome and Her Kings* (Bolchazy), McArdle and Suggitt’s *Per Saecula* (Longman), Cumming and Blundell’s playlet *Auricula Meretricula* (UC Berkeley Classics Dept.), my own *Latin Poetry for the Beginning Student* (Longman), and, most recently, Lawall and Tafe’s *Ecce Romani* (Longman). Of these, only *Auricula* and *Latin Poetry* were designed specifically as companions to Wheelock, with vocabulary and grammar accommodated to the presentation in his text; the readings in *Auricula,* however, are too limited, with scenes to follow only 9 of 40 chapters and spaced too far apart to ensure continuity of the narrative, and *Latin Poetry* of course provides only verse selections.. While not without imperfections; *Thirty-Eight Latin Stories,* by Anne Groton and James May, succeeds in meeting the need for a prose supplement to Wheelock, with readings to accompany each of Chapters 5-40. The first 18 stories are original compositions, ranging from 11 -to 18 lines and including a brief description of ‘The Ancient Roman School’ followed by 17 tales from classical mythology (‘The Tragic Story of Phaethon,’ ‘The Curse of Atreus,’ ‘Laocoon and the Trojan Horse,’ etc.). The stories to accompany Wheelock 21-40 are slightly longer (12 to 22 lines) and are all adaptations from classical authors, both prose and verse (done into prose), especially Cicero (from the Catilinarians, Brutus, On Old Age, and the Tusculan Disputations), but also Terence (from the Self- Tormentor), Caesar on the Belgae and the Helvetians, Sallust’s ‘View of Mankind’ (from the Catilinarian Conspiracy), Catullus 5 and 109, Vergil on the Golden Age (from the Fourth Eclogue) and the farmer’s life (Georgics 2), Horace’s ‘The Bore’ (Satires 1.9), Livy on Lucretia and Hannibal, Petronius on Roman education, Quintilian on Cicero’s oratory, and the younger Pliny (excerpts from two epistles). The Latin style and the synchronization with Wheelock’s grammar and vocabulary are for the most part successful. Some instructors may object to the occasional appearance in the Latin text of forms and syntax not yet formally introduced by Wheelock (e.g., the use of -io verbs in GM 9 before their formal presentation in Wheelock 10, or of deponent verbs from GM 21 onward, though not introduced by Wheelock until Chapter 34) but this generally troubles the beginning student very little and is a device familiar to those experienced with the grammarin- context approach of such programs as Ecce Romani or the Cambridge Latin Course: the student, for example, who reads ‘Nihil habeo quod agam’, GM 37, before Wheelock’s discussion of relative clauses of characteristic in Chapter 38, will not seriously misinterpret the author’s meaning, whether he construes agam as present subjunctive or future indicative. The book is simply laid out and very crisply printed. Following a one-page Foreword are the 38 stories, with Latin text on the verso, vocabulary not already introduced by Wheelock on the recto, and a Latin-English glossary at the end; macrons are included (though there are a few omissions, especially of so-called ‘hidden quantities,’ e.g., the a of actio, GM 39). I have now used the book in our LAT 101-102 sequence, as have some of our other faculty and graduate teaching assistants. For the most part response has been favorable; certainly my own students find the Groton/May stories preferable to the out-of-context, often complex or cloudy, I and, sometimes silly Sententiae Antiquae (my students now prepare the Practice and Review sentences for our first day on a chapter and the Groton and May story, or a Latin Poetry reading, for our second, with pre-selected Sententiae reserved for sight translation as time allows: programs which spend three periods on a Wheelock chapter might easily accommodate all three reading activities). All of the stories provide useful insights into classical myth or aspects of Roman life that make sense to students and that can be profitably elaborated upon by the instructor, again as time permits. After using the first edition for one term, I sent the publisher a short list of errata, nearly all of which have been corrected in this second edition. A more thoroughgoing revision, however, would greatly enhance the usefulness of the book: the later narratives are occasionally too dif.cult or confusing due to the sometimes extreme condensation and what will appear to beginning students to be lexical and syntactical peculiarities (e.g., the apparent anomaly of subject/verb agreement in coeperunt quoque, GM 51); modest rewriting and expansion of both the text and the notes would alleviate this sort of problem. An introductory paragraph should in every instance preface the story, to provide background and context necessary to the student’s .rst encounter with the text (there is ample space for this, as well as for an occasional illustration, on all of the verso pages), And .nally, for ease of reference in note-taking at home and in class work, line numbers might be provided. In view of the need this text uniquely satisfies, we may appropriately express hope for a more fully revised third edition. Meanwhile, I would enthusiastically recommend the book to all those who teach elementary Latin via Wheelock and wish to provide their students from the start with continuous passages of interesting and idiomatically sound Latin prose.