Fabulae Ab Urbe Condita: Latin Text with Facing Vocabulary and Commentary

Dr Steadman, a high school Latin teacher in Ohio, presents what he describes as "heavily adapted" Livy (from Books 1 and 2) and further adaptations from the 18th century French philologoist Charles Lhomond, originally published in one text at the beginning of the 20th Century. The result is an excellent, accessible, GCSE-level [ages 15 - 16, assuming the reader started Latin aged 11] Latin reader. Steadman expresses his hope in his introduction that it is the sort of book that students might "keep a copy by their bedsides," and to his credit, he has produced an accessible volume which the enthusiastic student might just keep as he suggests. His "house style" of a core vocabulary (at front and back), supplemented with additionally vocabulary and grammar commentary at the foot of a page of just 10 lines or so of text presents the student with a perfect learning environment: a manageable amount of text, and just enough help to enable continuous reading, but without spoon-feeding the reader. Dr Steadman gives proper credit for the readily accessible Latin to Sanford and Scott, but he deserves equal credit for the student-friendly presentation and extremely affordable format. The subject matter is as interesting as any Latin reader could be and I devoured this book on my daily commute by train; it paid no small part in re-building both my Latin vocabulary and my confidence to read something more challenging.Background to the Review:By way of background: I am now in my late 30s, hurtling towards 40. As my new year’s resolution in 2018, I resolved to improve my Latin to the level at which it had been when I was 18, before I went to University. I studied Latin between the ages of 11 and 18, up to and including A-Level (the academic pre-University exams in England and Wales). After a couple of months of relentlessly drilling noun, pronoun, adjective and verb endings, recommitting “hic, haec, hoc” and the imperfect subjunctive to memory, I started casting around for things to read. I knew I wasn’t ready for an Oxford Classical Text, but happily, there are far more accessible Latin textbooks, far more readily available than there were in 1998. These reviews deal with what I discovered, and what I thought of what I discovered.

After having finished an introductory course to Latin (i.e. having learned all cases, verb groups, conjugations and inflections, basic adjectives, pronouns and so on along with introductory readings), I have read this book over a few times with very good benefit and pleasure within the last two months or so (I am a self-learner and the book serves that purpose well). It provides vocabulary and grammar explanations on the same page as the text which is extremely useful, even if I did detect a few errors and missing pieces here and there.Following this, I moved on to Wheelock's Latin Reader (2nd ed.) which impressively seemed to offer much more for the intermediary reader, not least more varied, longer, and less heavily adapted readings, as well as better print and layout, but found that already the opening text (Cicero's first speech against Verres) was at the very limit of my level, and also that Wheelock only provides very sparse vocab and (for my level) insufficient grammar explanations on the same page as the text, meaning that I had to spend substantially more time switching between text, dictionary and grammar book. So I now moved back to Steadman's series.

This is a famous text for intermediate level Latin learners. Buy it, read it ten times, and your Latin will dramatically improve! This is a super book.

very pleased