An Anthology Of Latin Prose

A classic introduction to Latin literature, with translations of the best passages from Virgil, Livy, Ovid, Seneca and many others. This classic anthology traces the development of Latin literature from the early Republican works of Cicero and Catullus, to the writers of the Empire such as Lucan and Petronius, to the later writings of St Augustine. The selections cover comedy and epic, history and philosophy, in prose and in verse, and each passage is prefaced by an introduction to the author and his influence. The translators range across history from Alexander Pope and Lord Byron to contemporaries. The result is a broad and brilliant overview of the civilization of Rome and its Empire - an ideal introduction to Latin literature. Michael Grant was born in 1914. He served as an intelligence officer during the Second World War, and subsequently held academic posts at the universities of Cambridge, Edinburgh, Khartoum and Belfast. Over his lifetime, he published nearly fifty books on the ancient world, ranging from studies of Roman coinage, to biographies of Caesar, Nero and Jesus, to books on Ancient Israel and the Middle Ages. Many of his translations were published in Penguin Classics. Professor Grant moved to Italy in 1966, where he spent most of the rest of his life until his death in 2004.

This anthology fills a gap which has been widely felt. It gives students - at sixth-form, undergraduate or junior graduate level - the opportunity of sampling a very wide variety of Latin prose texts, chosen to illustrate both development and generic differences. Each of the 96 passages isaccompanied by a short introduction, and there are brief notes explaining difficult words and drawing attention to linguistic and stylistic points occurring in the extracts. The extracts range from the second century BC to the fifth century AD: Cato the Censor, C. Gracchus, and the annalists; Cicero(oratory, letters, philosophical treatises); the historians (Sallust, Livy, and Tacitus); non-historical prose (Seneca, Vitruvius, Pliny, Apuleius, Tertullian); and finally some early Patristic texts and extracts from the Vulgate.

The most inclusive single-volume anthology of Latin American poetry intranslation ever produced.

A wide variety of texts by the Latin satirists are presented here in a fully loaded resource to provide an innovative reading of satire's relation to Roman ideology. Brimming with notes, commentaries, essays and texts in translation, this book succeeds in its mission to help the student understand the history of Latin's modern scholarly reception. Focusing on the linguistic difficulties and problems of usage, and examining aspects of meter and style necessary for poetry appreciation, the commentary places each selection in its own historical context then using essays and critical excerpt, the genre's most salient features are elucidated to provide a further understanding of its place in history. Extremely student friendly, this stands well both as a companion to Latin Erotic Elegy and in its own right as an invaluable fund of knowledge for any Latin literature scholar.

Readings and Exercises in Latin Prose Composition provides a refreshing approach for the standard Latin composition course offered at the college level. This text encourages the student to think in Latin through the process of reading unedited Latin selections and then composing in Latin, as opposed to the process of translating back and forth into English. The book offers a number of highly structured composition exercises that introduce students to a deeper understanding of Latin grammar and prose as well as to greater facility in reading and understanding it.

Each selection begins with a short biographical and historical essay.

Reading Medieval Latin is an introduction to medieval Latin in its cultural and historical context and is designed to serve the needs of students who have completed the learning of basic classical Latin morphology and syntax. (Users of Reading Latin will find that it follows on after the end of section 5 of that course.) It is an anthology, organised chronologically and thematically in four parts. Each part is divided into chapters with introductory material, texts, and commentaries which give help with syntax, sentence-structure, and background. There are brief sections on medieval orthography and grammar, together with a vocabulary which includes words (or meanings) not found in standard classical dictionaries. The texts chosen cover areas of interest to students of medieval history, philosophy, theology, and literature.

This book contains over fifty passages of Latin from 200 BC to AD 900, each with translation and linguistic commentary. It is not intended as an elementary reader (though suitable for university courses), but as an illustrative history of Latin covering more than a millennium, with almost every century represented. Conventional histories cite constructions out of context, whereas this work gives a sense of the period, genre, stylistic aims and idiosyncrasies of specific passages. 'Informal' texts, particularly if they portray talk, reflect linguistic variety and change better than texts adhering to classicising norms. Some of the texts are recent discoveries or little known. Writing tablets are well represented, as are literary and technical texts down to the early medieval period, when striking changes appear. The commentaries identify innovations, discontinuities and phenomena of long duration. Readers will learn much about the diversity and development of Latin.