Customer Reviews

Ovid: Amores, Metamorphoses : Selections

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I have been taking an intensive second year latin course, and we have used quite a few book during the class. This is by far the best for enabling you to learn to read latin that hasn't been made up specifically for students.

Each page contains 4-8 lines of latin, which are numbered every 5 lines. This takes about a third of the page. The rest of each page is left for extensive notes on the latin. The notes include unusual vocabulary, historical notes, translation of unusual phrases, and explainations of constructs used. For example it points out instances of chiasmus, which are arrangments of words in an ABBA pattern. This kind of thing is very useful because it allows you to get used to the unusual but regular word ordering that is found in latin poetry. One other thing I especially liked about the notes is that they always gave a full dictionary entry when saying what a word means (so you can then determine by the morphology what role the word is playing).

The book also has several other sections. First is a question and answers section which is a good place to check when anything is confusing you. It will point show what selected words and clauses are doing in a sentance, what they're modifying, disambiguate cases, etc. There are sections on different uses and terms related to meter, as well as figures of speech common in poetry. The final feature is one of the most useful....a dictionary with every single word used throughout the book. It is much faster to look a word up here rather than in a complete dictionary, and it provides the meaning that is most likely to be used in the context of the poems.

Overall, this is a great book.

I am using this book in my Latin class. It has provided assistance with vocabulary and some translation. This book does all that a book should for a foreign language book. Cindy