This volume edited by James Faville, Michael Francis, Joseph DiProperzio, and Steven Merola is a unique and welcome addition to the abundant corpus of Latin readers. This reader is aimed at intermediate or advanced students who have a solid foundation in the basics of Latin. For students who are ready to develop their reading skills with minimally adapted passages, the readings may be completed with some instructional help. For advanced students, the text is easy to read using the resources provided. The book itself is intended to function as supplementary material within a course but is adaptable to independent use. Because it is a reader, it does not provide scholarly commentary on the material but focuses on Latin language exposure through the direct method as an all-Latin book.
The book has two components: the student text (Animalia: A Latin Reader) and the Teacher’s Guide (a complementary volume purchased separately). The reader consists of four chapters, each one dedicated to a specific animal: the lion, the bee, the dolphin, and the horse. Each of these chapters has four to six relevant texts, preceded by a paragraph introducing the animal, amounting to twenty-four passages in total. These texts are a mix of unadapted and lightly adapted excerpts. The readings offer a varied selection of authors and eras of the Latin language, with each passage focusing on the animal of the chapter. The chosen excerpts are all of an appropriate difficulty for intermediate students, with slight variation between authors. The notes on the opposing page help with challenging or unusual vocabulary, difficult sentences, grammatical concepts, and rhetorical concepts. There are short introductions to the author and text in Latin at the beginning of each reading. Reading comprehension questions accompany each text and the discussion questions at the end of each chapter draw all of the readings together.
Each chapter begins with a relevant Latin rendering of Aesop. The first chapter, on the lion, features excerpts from Physiologus Latinus I, The Book of Daniel 6:1–7, 9–13, 16–28, and Gellius’ Noctes Atticae 5.14. Chapter two, on the bee, includes the first of two excerpts from Charles de la Rue, Bartolomaeus Anglicus’ De Proprietatibus Rerum 12.4 and 18.11, Vergil’s Georgics 4.177–206, and the Gregorian chant ‘Exsultet’. There are also two Latin adaptations: one of Theocritus’ Idyll 19, adapted by Andrea Alciato, and Anacreonta 35, adapted by Henri Estienne. In the third chapter, on the dolphin, the reader will find Isidore’s Etymologiae 12.6.11, Pliny the Younger’s Letters 9.33.2–10, Pliny the Elder’s Natural History 9.8–9, and Ovid’s Fasti 2.83–118. The readings in the fourth chapter, on the horse, are Sanctus Ioannes’ The Apocolypse 6:1–8, Thomas Seward, the second Charles de la Rue passage, and Vergil’s Aeneid 2.41–53.
The layout and design of the book is quite attractive. Many pages have artwork that is either commissioned for the book or historical, which is sure to grab students’ attention. Four of the pieces of artwork are drawings of the animal with their parts labelled in Latin. One of the chapters includes, in addition, a labelled drawing of a ship. These illustrations are particularly useful for associating foreign words with their objects directly. Other pieces of historical art appear throughout with a sentence or two describing them in Latin.
The Teacher’s Guide, written in English, is an excellent resource for teaching the material because it provides suggestions, background information of the authors and texts, and notes where students may have difficulties with a passage or piece of grammar. Since the excerpts in this reader are sourced from a wide variety of texts, with respect to both their genre and their time-period, the background information provides nuance that might otherwise be unfamiliar to some teachers. Of particular note is the introductory guide on how to use an all-Latin textbook with sample teacher-student Latin dialogue. The aim of this guide is to encourage and enable teachers to incorporate the direct method into their lessons. While teaching in Latin is the editors’ preferred method, and the method for which this book was written, they understand that this is not always attainable due to the teacher’s or the student’s previous experience with Latin. To this end, they encourage the active use of Latin but expressly acknowledge that the book may be used in an entirely English-speaking classroom.
With the exception of the introduction and the Latin-English glossary at the back, the reader is entirely in Latin from vocabulary aid to references to grammar. A particularly unique and successful feature of the book is the inclusion of select grammatical and rhetorical concepts throughout the book which are explained, as expected, entirely in Latin. The editors have written these sections in simple prose that should be accessible to any intermediate student. These explanations are supplemented with examples directly from the texts. For grammar, there are the double dative, correlatives, and the dative of possession, and for rhetorical devices, there are alliteration, chiasmus, enjambment, and synecdoche. It is unfortunate that these are the only grammatical and rhetorical concepts that are given dedicated explanation because this is such a successful feature of the book.
Underlining and italics is a strategy used to help students reading the texts make connections between words that logically go together but are not placed side by side. These are in general well-placed and appropriately used. There are, however, two instances within the same text that may confuse students. For example (p. 73 lines 18 and 20):
cēteraque armātā cōnscia turba manū
nōn haec sunt digitīs arma tenenda tuīs
In each case, the student might be led to assume that because cētera and haec are not also underlined, they do not go with cōnscia turba and arma tenenda respectively. Perhaps this can be remedied in a future printing.
Throughout the book, the left-hand page presents all-Latin notes. Synonyms are given for difficult vocabulary to help students make connections and understand the text without relying on English. Often, the editors provide synonyms that are English cognates. Some more difficult words are given a definition rather than synonyms. Any words which are not present in the notes can easily be found in the Latin-English glossary. In the notes, students will also find difficult sentences rearranged into typical English word-order or rewritten in simpler Latin. For example (p. 36–37, line 4):
prō eō perīre pulchrum putant: apes honōrātī sunt prō rēge perīre
There are limitations to this approach. While these types of notes are useful for helping students to understand the meaning of the sentence, they provide no grammatical explanation for the concept that is causing the difficulty. In this instance in particular, it would be useful to note that there is a missing esse which is the infinitive verb of the indirect discourse, and that prō eō perīre is a noun clause acting as the subject of the implied esse. Perhaps these types of explanations were avoided because they would be too challenging to render into simple Latin, or perhaps the editors prefer a natural acquisition and subsequent understanding of the language, as in the style of modern-language learning, with minor grammar work. But Latin, as a very inflected language that is most often acquired as an academic language, requires the study of grammar. In fact, sometimes the meaning(s) of a text hinges on very minute grammatical details. The natural experience of reading Latin and the detailed knowledge of grammar do not have to be mutually exclusive.
All in all, I do think that Animalia is a great step in this direction when compared with other texts that favour the direct approach. Hans Ørberg’s Lingua Latina Per Se Illustrata, a graded text that begins with very simple Latin and slowly scales to more challenging prose, features no discussion of grammar throughout the book but assumes a passive acquisition of the language through the natural experience of reading. The “Grammatica Latina” sections that appear towards the end of Ørberg’s book consist primarily of examples rather than explanation. Alternatively, a reader may consult the accompanying grammar and vocabulary book which is in English. While both books aim to keep the reader in the target language, Animalia succeeds in teaching at least some grammatical concepts in the target language, which is an exciting development.
The minor comments I have made do not detract from the overall achievement of this book, which would make a welcome addition to an intermediate Latin course. Animalia is suited to any approach, whether the direct approach is used throughout the course, not at all, or a mix. The fact that all the content in the book is in Latin will give students a sort of immersion in the language alone. The book also contains enough resources for an advanced or dedicated intermediate reader to use independently. In both content and form, Animalia is unique. Focusing solely on ancient stories of animals, the book not only functions as a text by which to learn Latin and develop reading skills, but also provides a broad picture of the depiction of these animals in literature, a topic which is little addressed in a typical course. This text will prove a useful and stimulating one from which to learn the language.