The recent explosion of interest in mythic retelling and in the voices of women in antiquity has reshaped both the popular and the pedagogical landscape of classical myth. Heroines of Greek and Roman Myth sits at the intersection of those developments. Maxwell Teitel Paule gives intermediate students continuous Latin prose centered on women long marginalized in the introductory syllabus, offering a fresh approach to reading Latin. Nine adapted stories, each supported by an introduction, glosses, and grammatical notes, are pitched at the gap that can trouble any Latin program: the passage from textbook prose to unadapted ancient text. The book largely succeeds at what it sets out to do. My criticisms are correspondingly narrow, and are offered less as objections to the project than as advance notice to teachers who will use it in a classroom.
Paule addresses intermediate readers or readers at the end of an introductory Latin unit, and the “Note to Readers” is careful to disclaim allegiance to any particular first-year textbook. The vocabulary base is instead the Dickinson College Commentaries’ Latin Core Vocabulary of roughly 1,000 words. Within each chapter the introduction sketches the heroine and, where the tradition allows, her historical footing (Dido’s, for instance, by way of Timaeus of Tauromenium and Ennius), and the emphasis falls consistently on the heroine’s strength and independence rather than on her suffering. The nine chapters treat Atalanta, Dido, Iphis and Ianthe, Camilla, Medea, Circe, Ariadne, Clytemnestra, and Cloelia. Each contains an introduction to the myth, adaptation notes, a list of the ancient sources behind the passage, a statement of the grammar highlighted, the Latin text, two to four discussion questions, and chapter vocabulary; words outside the core vocabulary appear in bold in the text and are glossed parenthetically in line. Three appendices follow: English translations of the passages, which Paule expressly offers as loose renderings to be consulted for clarification rather than used in place of translating; suggestions for further reading, two to five items per heroine; and the Latin Core Vocabulary in alphabetical Latin-to-English order.
The book’s innovation lies in its focus: Paule presents these narratives without accounts of sexual assault, on the reasoning that students should not have to negotiate potentially traumatic material at the same moment they are negotiating Latin syntax. Given how thoroughly such material saturates the mythographic tradition, this reader is a genuine and, to my knowledge, nearly unique contribution to the genre. It is also achieved with less violence to the sources than one might fear. The adaptation notes are candid about what has been trimmed and the storylines survive intact. Paule’s Camilla renders Vergil’s poetry into legible prose rather than rewriting it: close behind dūra proelia adsuēvit et cursū pedum ventōs superāre potuit (32f) stands sed proelia virgo / dura pati cursuque pedum praevertere ventos.[1] Where he does intervene, the intervention is tonal. The Ligurian trickster’s taunt at Aeneid 11.705–708, quid tam egregium, si femina forti / fidis equo?, becomes the frankly diminutive Ō puellula, certē nōn virum superāre potes! (34), sharpening the reader’s sense of what Camilla is up against without altering the outcome.
Where the volume is less helpful is in its account of the grammar it actually requires. The headings that announce highlighted grammar are underspecified to the point of being misleading. Chapter 1 lists “declensions 1–3, present active system of verbs,” yet by the second sentence of the Atalanta story students meet cum governing a perfect deponent indicative (nāta est), and mōta est and victa est follow. A student who consults Appendix C for help will find cum glossed as “with (prep. + abl.); when, since, although (conjunction + subj.)”, which excludes the construction in front of her. Nor is the grammar presupposed by the reader stated anywhere. From the first two chapters alone, the working assumptions include all five declensions, all four conjugations in the perfect as well as the present system, participles, and ablative absolutes; there are no subjunctives. A short table of assumed knowledge, and a fuller statement of highlighted grammar per chapter, would cost a page and save considerable improvisation.
Glossing is likewise uneven in a way that undercuts the book’s own sequence. Chapter 3 is explicitly devoted to passive and deponent verbs, but in Chapter 4 comitāta est is glossed “accompanied,” while armāta est, three lines later, is glossed “was armed” (33). Students who have just spent a chapter learning to distinguish deponent from passive are given no signal that the difference in the English is doing morphological work. Elsewhere deponents are glossed as though they were transparent (vēnābantur, irascābitur, 19–20), and verbs are sometimes defined with an unnecessary infinitive “to.” The passive is in any case thinly represented: by my count Chapter 4 contains some 120 active indicatives, nine deponents, and only six passives, two of which are translated for the student. Word order raises a related concern. Predicates regularly precede their linking verbs and genitives regularly precede the nouns they modify, patterns that are neither wrong nor, in classical prose, prevalent. In the chapter announced as highlighting indirect statement, eleven of sixty-seven sentences contain one, and in four of those eleven the head verb sits at the very end, after the accusative and infinitive. Since the book’s stated aim is to acclimate students to authentic word order in the later chapters, more consistent modeling of ordinary prose habits would strengthen the design rather than complicate it.
A handful of production and copy matters remain. Chapter vocabulary lists capitalize the first letter of every lemma, so students cannot distinguish proper from common nouns at a glance; Appendix C is inconsistent in citing principal parts (careo -ere -ui against caveo cavere cavi cautum a few lines later) and omits commas between forms. Footnote markers are not superscript at p. 17 n. 11, p. 33 n. 2, and p. 89 nn. 8–9. In the Latin itself, irascābitur (20) should be īrāscētur for the third-conjugation deponent the vocabulary correctly lists and pulvus momordit (39) wants pulverem. None of these impedes comprehension, however.
These are small charges against a book that does something difficult with real economy. Paule has produced a reader that is coherent in its selection, honest about its adaptations, generous in its glossing, and unusual in taking seriously the question of what we ask students to sit with while they learn. Teachers who adopt it will want to supply their own map of the grammar and to preview the deponents themselves; in exchange they get nine narratives that students are likely to want to finish. That the volume is easily accessible makes it easier still to recommend.
Notes
[1]Vergil, Aeneid 7.806–807.