Sallust The Jugurthine War Partly In The Original And Partly In Translation Edited By He Butler

From the PREFACE: THE aim of this book is to make it possible for a class to read the Jugurtha within the restricted time available for the teaching of Latin. It is a work which is in many ways eminently suited for school reading, but has suffered a certain neglect owing to its length. The principle adopted in the present series of textbooks should eliminate this difficulty and enable a student to get a good idea of the nature of Sallust's writing without sacrificing his subject matter. No attempt has been made to proportion the lengths of Latin and English with precision. It should require no great ingenuity on the part of the teacher to surmount such difficulty as the disproportion between Latin and English may on occasion present. The translation makes no attempt at literalness, and phrases have at times been omitted with a view to reducing the bulk of the book, while a few chapters (17-19 and 77-79) have been merely summarized. The notes have been kept within narrow limits; with the aid of the vocabulary and the commentary the student should be able to produce an adequate rendering of the Latin, while the more detailed instruction may and should be left to the teacher, for whom it is scarcely necessary to point out that such textbooks are not designed: it has also been assumed that the student called upon to read Sallust will have a somewhat more advanced knowledge of Latin than those who have not progressed beyond Caesar. Little has been said about the style of Sallust; such discussions are apt to pass over the heads of all save the more advanced students or to be tacitly ignored. Here again such instruction, if it be thought desirable, must be left to the individual teacher: the information is easily accessible and it is for the teacher to give it life, if he feels that his pupils are ripe for such instruction.