Learn Latin with Aesop: An Easy Latin Reader with Translations

How many do not know the expressions “sour grapes” or “the boy who cried wolf” or “tying the bell on the cat”? Aesop’s fables are something like a universal language. They are amusing and instructive parables that carry some of the shared Mediterranean heritage that helps to define a now globally relevant and diverse classical culture. In the Latin version of the fifty-two fables offered here, the stories are so short and vivid that they are especially handy for Latin teachers to use early in the language program in order to highlight and impress upon students’ minds certain words, expressions, and structures. They are perfect for sight-reading or for self-instruction, but they can also be used as a in conjunction with Latin prose composition courses that require students to write variations in Latin or to retranslate from the English back into Latin. Grammatical and dictionary helps are not given here: one can begin to learn a language well even without such tools, simply by paying very careful attention to “what means what.” In fact, that is how it is usually done. This book is a companion to Learn Latin with Celebrities. It owes its Latin contents in a similar way to John Ogilby’s 1839 revision of the Jacobs-Döring reader, while the English translation is, as there, entirely original with this edition.