Livy: Book I (Latin Texts)

This is a superb text for students. Lots of notes in the back for translation aids in addition to historic and cultural information, plus a dictionary for text in the book. I would choose texts from this editor and publisher again.

A good book for students as it is divided into many subsections, each one being prefaced by a short synopsis in English.

If you've finished third year Latin (e.g. something like Wheelock's reader or any text going over Cicero) you should be ready for this. The grammatical notes are copious, but mostly glosses (paraphrases rather than detailed grammatical explanations). You'll need to know most of the details of Latin grammar and syntax before you will get anything out of reading this text in this form. There are no macrons, minimal punctuation, and minimal grammatical help beyond the glosses. Livy writes in very long periodic sentences, longer and more complicated than Cicero's generally. His vocabulary is varied. He will often use a different word for the same thing in the same (long) sentence just for variety. This is not easy Latin. On the other hand the glosses are probably sufficient to get you through it, though you'll need to work at filling in missing grammatical details. I'd say this is a good fourth year text for a self-learner provided they were willing to follow up any areas of doubt using a decent grammar. Unfortunately Latin resources on the internet are not yet sufficient for even this level of research. You'll need a couple of good reference books. It would probably take a decent student 2-3 months to work through this with a reasonable attention to detail. It would be a good prelude for jumping into Golden Age poetry (i.e. Ovid, Vergil etc.).

This is a review of Gould and Whiteley's commentary on Book One of Livy published by the Bristol Classical Press. This commentary is designed for the reader who knows the basics of Latin grammar well and wishes to peruse the first book of Livy quickly and efficiently. In addition to the Latin text of Book One and a commentary on the text, G&W have provided a brief 10 page introduction to Livy's life, style, and the historical period covered by Book One. There is also a complete, concise glossary in the back of this volume that contains all of the Latin vocabulary used in Book One. The Latin text of Livy's Preface is also included, but G&W only provide a translation for this, not a commentary. In the Latin text, a one or two sentence English summary of major events is affixed to each of Book One's 60 chapters, giving the reader clear guidance about what to look out for in each section of the text. The commentary proper is very succinct and gives the reader only the bare necessities required for drawing out the basic meaning of the text. For example, G&W will label potentially confusing ablatives as Ablatives of Respect, Ablatives of Comparison, Ablatives of Degree of Difference, etc. They will indicate why a verb is subjunctive. They will explain obscure proper nouns and Roman customs. They will provide advice about how to translate difficult clauses and phrases into English, and sometimes they will provide a rendering of a particularly thorny Latin phrase into English, and so on. There is, however, no discussion of any scholarship on Livy, and there is very little if any historical or literary interpretation of Livy's narrative. Overall, I found this commentary very useful as an aid to rapidly reading through Book One. I would estimate that this edition would be accessible to a student in his or her third year of Latin or beyond, although some supplementary reading or instruction in early Roman history and Livy's aims and method would be advisable for said student to seek out before embarking upon reading this profoundly interesting and engaging narrative of Rome's seven legendary kings and the establishment of the Republic.