Preface

Summary of This Sourcebook

This sourcebook offers a carefully-honed selection of Latin authors, predominately from classical antiquity, and supplemented by texts from later periods. The sourcebook purposefully includes both prose and poetry, and a range of genres, including epic, epigram, history, oratory, the letter, and the philosophical essay. Most of the core texts include supplemental notes that will elucidate key grammatical and cultural information for intermediate-level Latin students, as well as provide questions to guide their reading and contextualizing essays on the authors, texts, and ideas with which students are engaging. The book will also include a range of pedagogical resources for students at this level that have been developed and tested through over 15 years of educational practice.

Content and Format

This sourcebook begins by conveying a few truths about how Latin operates (Axiomata XII Nostrae), some observations about the way that Latin behaves (XIV Mores Latinitatis), some detailed suggestions about an effective way to prepare for an intermediate Latin class in a collegiate setting (“Suggestions for Success or Habitus Latinus”), and a brief survey of different kinds of translation.

The core of the sourcebook will comprise six chapters on:

1. Simple readings on Amicitia & Inimicitia (‘friendship & anti-friendship’)
2. (Mostly) Friendly Epigrams
3. Philosophical Friendship
4. The Metus Hostis (‘the fear of the foreign enemy’) and Carthage
5. Friendship in Epigraphy
6. Hostes Rei Publicae (‘enemies of the state’)

Chapters 1, 2, 3 , and 5 will provide all resources for engaging with these concepts. Chapter 5 and 6 will provide some texts, commentaries, and resources, but also introduce students to and produce supplemental resources and contextualization for other popular Open Access resources like the Dickinson College Commentary series. Appendices grammatical matters complete this sourcebook.

Goals of “Reading Friendship and Enmity”

This sourcebook aims to:

• Introduce students to the study of ancient texts in the original in a collegiate setting
• Provide Latin texts with full intermediate-level commentaries for all texts in the book, most of which are not otherwise available
• Provide supplemental vocabulary resources via the Haverford-supported educational resource, “The Bridge” (bridge.haverford.edu)
• Introduce the students to other Open Education Resources (e.g., Logeion, Dickinson College Commentaries, latintutorial.com, hexameter.co)
• Provide an all-in-one textbook and resource for Haverford’s Latin class — and other schools and students
• Provide a modular sourcebook, such that instructors could use piecemeal to supplement other texts and approaches

This Open Educational Resource emerges from Haverford’s course on Roman friendship and enmity for annual use in Haverford’s fourth-semester Latin course. This class features a diverse range of readings, some of which are available only in expensive and/or hard to find editions, or in editions that lack the supplemental resources (commentaries, vocabularies, etc.) that would make them accessible to readers at the intermediate level. While the local need provided the impetus for developing this resource, it is hoped that the topics and texts of the sourcebook will grant it widespread appeal among Latin instructors and independent learners.

This reader remains a work in progress. You will inevitably discover mistakes — errare humanum est and that is doubly true when one is developing an instructional book. This also means that you, dear reader, are in a position to influence what future generations of students read and experience. I invite you, therefore, to let me know what is, and just as importantly, what is not working in the various sections of the Reader. Your suggestions will be appreciated.