A Livy Reader: Selections from Ab Urbe Condita
Bolchazy-Carducci long has been supplying teachers of all levels with readers of various authors. This book is a welcome addition to that supply. It is one of Bolchazy's Latin Reader series that includes Apuleius, Caesar, Lucan, Martial, and epics, as well as some topical editions, e.g., women, the military, etc.; the title page of Jaeger's book reports that nineteen editions are planned. The Livy edition is a slim volume with little adornment that includes eighteen selections. The readings are presented in order by decade, including one from the preface. Also included are notes, two maps, and a glossary, all of which follow the text.I do commend Jaeger for providing a full sense of Livy's breadth; too often readings in Livy are confined to the stories of the first decade made so famous by generations of later visual artists. Jaeger's inclusion of the Punic wars and the Bacchic 'conspiracy' (her quotations), in addition to some old favorites from the first decade, will allow students and teachers to experience Livy and his Roman history in its different incarnations.The introduction includes seven headed sections: Livy's life and times; Livy's work, subject and scope; Livy's sources; ideas; Livy's artistry; reception; and suggested reading. Jaeger makes the economy of the format effective. Each section includes a wealth of useful and interesting information in a relatively small space. In the section on Livy's artistry, for instance, Jaeger manages both to outline the literary tradition within which Livy was writing and to develop specifically how his use of participles represents a departure from that tradition, providing readers with both the broad view of Livy as an author and a specific feature of his writing.The notes for each section open with a prefatory description of either the selection, its background, or a combination of both. This proves a helpful introduction to the upcoming text and allows students some measure of familiarity with the plot. The notes themselves cover a wide range of topics, from grammar to sentence structure to history and background to rhetorical figures.The glossary seems comprehensive, stretching from page 87 to 127, comprising almost a third of the pages of the book, and indeed includes in it perhaps the Latin word least in need of defining, et. Some mention of the extent of this comprehensiveness might have been helpful, at least to the instructor, if not the student. The two maps are beautifully done; the cartographers at Bolchazy-Carducci should be commended.Mary Jaeger'sA Livy Readeris a welcome addition to the market. An author as interesting and readable as Livy is surprisingly underrepresented among available readers, Minkova and Tunberg'sReading Livy's Rome: Selections from Books I-VI Livy's Ab Urbe Condita(Bolchazy-Carducci 2005) being an exception. Jaeger not only addresses that lacuna but also does so in a way that does not merely recapitulate what is already available. She introduces the reader and student to the full breadth of Livy's narrative and historiographic scope with a straightforward approach and useful ancillaries. Her text will anchor or supplement courses from a third year high school course that is introducing students to reading Latin for the first time to a college survey course to a course focused on Livy himself. Both it and Bolchazy's Latin Reader series fulfill an important role in classics publishing: the expansion of reading resources available to instructors. For that both Jaeger and Bolchazy should be commended. --Ed DeHoratius, Wayland School, MA