stomachor!

What makes a "teacher's guide"?  Is it the editor's helpful notes on lesson planning or specific problems in the text?  Is it the guidance in effective approaches, or making connections to secondary material?  Is it the insight into the editor's intent and the choices made in selection and presentation, that allow you to make up your mind as to whether you agree, and if not how to adapt?

I suspect it's all these things and more.  What a "teacher's guide" is not, however, is a bare set of translations for teachers who don't have enough Latin to read the texts they're assigning to their students.

This is what I found today when I received a new classroom set of Minkova & Tunberg's Reading Livy's Rome (Bolchazy-Carducci).

When ordering the book, one receives no hint of the subtitle: "Translation of Paraphrases," or the blurb headed "Ease the Time Crunch of Daily Classroom Preparation."  Reading bits of Latin is the least of my concerns as a teacher, and yet it's the one area in which a teacher of Latin can least afford to cut corners.  I neither need nor can benefit from translations: I know Latin well enough to read it, and only by reading it (rather than a translation) can I anticipate and respond to the difficulties my students will face.

Was I wrong to expect a "guide" or was Bolchazy-Carducci wrong to call it that?

I was acting a time crunch when I ordered the materials, being told during the last period of the day that I had until the final bell to put together an order.  So it may be argued that I was rash in ordering copies of the "guide" for my colleague and myself.  And yet if it had been appropriately titled, or explained at all, on the publisher's site, my school could have purchased two more student texts instead.

Then again I might have guessed from the "guide" to Boyd's Aeneid selections.

Isn't there a better name for this sort of thing?  Like "trot"?

AP Latin

With all of the hullabaloo being made over the cancellation of AP Latin: Literature, I just wanted to express my appreciation to College Board for administering the Vergil exam.  I'm the minority (vocally, at least) in thinking that Catullus is less suited to an AP course than is Vergil, and I would not want to teach the Literature option because my students read much of Catullus before the AP year.  What I'm really thankful for, however, is that College Board has somehow made it possible for me to read lots and lots of Vergil.  Without the test I would not likely be able to offer a full semester of him.

I will never understand why so many teachers seem to think that reading Vergil is a chore.  There's far less reward in counting kisses or feigning invitations to dinner.

Memory, Pleasure, and Suffering/Aeneas, Odysseus, and Eumaios

It is well known that Aeneas' speech in Aeneid 1.198-207 draws on a speech of Odysseus in Odyssey 12.208ff. (see, e.g., R.D. Williams ad A.1.198f. Here is Aeneas' speech (online text here):

'O socii—neque enim ignari sumus ante malorum—
O passi graviora, dabit deus his quoque finem.
Vos et Scyllaeam rabiem penitusque sonantis 200
accestis scopulos, vos et Cyclopea saxa
experti: revocate animos, maestumque timorem
mittite: forsan et haec olim meminisse iuvabit.
Per varios casus, per tot discrimina rerum
tendimus in Latium; sedes ubi fata quietas 205
ostendunt; illic fas regna resurgere Troiae.
Durate, et vosmet rebus servate secundis.'

The first 9 ll. of Odysseus' speech run as follows (12.208-16, Lattimore's translation):

'Dear friends, surely we are not unlearned in evils.
This is no greater evil now than it was when the Cyclops
had us cooped in his hollow cave by force and violence,
but even there, by my courage and counsel and my intelligence,
we escaped away. I think that all this will be remembered
some day too. Then do as I say, let us all be won over.
Sit well, all of you, to your oarlocks, and dash your oars deep
into the breaking surf of the water, so in that way Zeus
might grant that we get clear of this danger and flee away from it.'

A quick glance at the two passages will make clear some of the similarities (e.g., the first line of each speech and the reference to the Cyclops). In addition, Williams (at A.1.203) states that forsan et haec olim meminisse iuvabit recalls Od.12.212 (here rendered 'I think that all this will be remembered some day too'), and the infintives for 'to remember' (meminisse and mnhsesthai) certainly point in that direction. I was recently struck, however, by the similarity in sentiment to 1.203 that is found in Eumaios' words in 15.400-1 (again in Lattimore's translation):

'For afterwards a man who has suffered
much and wandered much has pleasures out of his sorrows.'

These words come as Eumaois is about to tell (that is, in a sense, to remember) the story of his sufferings to Odysseus. Perhaps there is a secondary reference in the Aeneid to this passage, in which the idea of pleasure in the memory or recounting of sufferings is foregrounded.

If that is not the case and I am over-reading, the words of Aeneas in Book 1 still still line up with those of Eumaois quite nicely.

Literature in translation?

I have long wanted a reader in classical literature in translation to build into the early years of my Latin language courses, but have come up empty. Several years ago in the course that put me on the path toward classics (a brilliant course called simply 'Humanities'), one of the two instructors lamented that there wasn't a better or more affordable set of anthologies than the little paperback Penguins by Michael Grant. If memory serves they were boring and scatter-shot to my young college brain, and even if they were not now out of print, I could not see purchasing them for high school students.

Surely I am not alone in wanting something like this to help contextualize the study of Latin, and to help communicate things like values that do not translate from the pages of introductory textbooks.

Has anyone a suggestion?