Welcome to this series of posts about tiered readers written in celebration of the impending launch of my book, The Lover’s Curse: A Tiered Reader of Aeneid 4. I hope you can join me on Saturday 23 for the Livestream launch party at this link (or click the thumbnail below). For this post series leading up to the livestream, each day I’ll showcase different tiered readers in Latin which have been published or are soon to be published.

Firstly, in case you’re unfamiliar, what is a ‘tiered’ text?

Tiered texts, also known in the literature as ‘embedded readings’, consist of two or more versions (or ‘tiers’) of the same story retold with gradually increasing levels of complexity. An English analogue is the student reader series No Fear Shakespeare, which presents a plain modern English rendition of Shakespeare’s writing alongside the original text. By reading the plain version along with the original, weaker readers are able to understand more complex or unfamiliar language through reading the same story in simpler or more familiar language. A similar method can be used in Classics when we read a simpler version of the story in Latin before gradually increasing the difficulty up to the final tier.

This reading approach allows us to increase the comprehensibility of authentic texts while delivering much of the help in the target language itself. Students can understand complex language through simpler language (rather than just through native language glosses), they can build mental connections between the different ways of phrasing the same topic, read larger amounts of Latin while experiencing less cognitive burden, and encounter words multiple times as they are recycled throughout the tiers. Readers tend to remember plot information more reliably (as they have read it in multiple different phrasings). The exercise also provides opportunities for instructors to compare and contrast the more elaborate use of language in the final tier with the plainer use of language in the lower tiers.

While tiered readers provide many benefits, they take a lot of labour to produce.

That is why I think it is important to spotlight and showcase published tiered readers. It takes a lot of specialised skill and time to accurately rephrase texts to be easier to understand without sacrificing natural expression, and to put it all together into a polished and edited volume.

With all that said, let’s have a look at some of the earliest published works that could fit under the model of a ‘tiered reader.’ The texts in this category are all in the public domain and freely accessible.

Tiered Readers in the Public Domain

The Ad Usum Delphini series

The ad Usum Delphini series of Classical texts started being published in 1674 with an edition of Sallust edited by Daniel Crispin. These books were student editions of Latin works with a prose paraphrase of poetical language and a commentary in Latin.

This prose paraphrase acts as a tier which guides the reader towards understanding. It explains the content of the poetical text and uses a plainer prose-like word order rather than Vergil’s more intricately involved poetic word order. It is also remarkable that almost all works of the Classical canon have been covered in an Ad Usum Delphini edition at some point.

However, one drawback which restricts the usability of the Ad Usum Delphini series for early intermediate learners is that the prose paraphrase contains a richness of vocabulary which is similar to the difficulty of unadapted prose Latin texts in general. That is, while it is still easier to read than poetry, it nevertheless contains a large amount of vocabulary which my year 12 students would find challenging.

Here is a scan of the opening of book 4 of the Aeneid from a version published in 1822. (You can check out the full Vergil volume at this link on archive.org)

And here is a scan of the same passage from a different book on archive.org (linked here) titled Delphin Classics, whose Vergil section was labeled as being published in 1819. It has the same prose paraphrase as the above, but it is formatted differently.

Although the prose paraphrases may still be somewhat difficult to read for students who have only just completed an introductory course such as LLPSI: Familia Romana or The Cambridge Latin Course, the Ad Usum Delphini series are an invaluable resource for modelling how we can rephrase poetic expressions in slightly simpler, yet rich and expressive Latin prose. Seeing how a particular concept was expressed in good Latin prose is really helpful when you are writing your own tiered resources, even if you do not actually reuse the Ad Usum Delphini prose paraphrase most of the time.

Dewey’s interlinear of the Aeneid

This second example of a public domain tiered text is, strictly speaking, an interlinear adaptation rather than a tiered text in itself. This is Dewey’s interlinear of the Aeneid, books 1-6, in which Vergil’s words have been rearranged into an English word order. Although it is not a tiered text on its own, I have heard of teachers using this interlinear paraphrase as a first encounter with the text before students read the original in Vergil’s poetic word order. When employed in this way, it functions as a guide to understanding the authentic text through first understanding a more comprehensible adaptation, and thus forms the base of a two-level tiered text.

Here is a scan of the start of book 4, which you can view on archive.org at this link:

A drawback for using Dewey’s interlinear is that it rearranges the Latin words not into the semi-flexible word order characteristic of Latin prose, but into a strict English word order. This may not be desirable for some readers who would have wanted to train their brains to work more with a Latin-inspired word order than an English word order artificially imposed on Latin.

A second drawback is that it does not use simpler Latin words to explain difficult poetic vocabulary, but instead relies on English glossing in the form of the running interlinear translation underneath each Latin word. The text encourages you to connect the Latin word with the supplied English word, but you are not given the same opportunity to connect Latin words with each other in the way that a Latin paraphrase in simpler language would invite you to.

Nevertheless, Dewey’s interlinear is an important work in that it demonstrates that even rearranging the order of words without changing the words themselves can be a viable strategy to make a text more comprehensible. Most multi-level tiered texts in recent times have harnessed a similar strategy: the second-last tier is almost always a paraphrase in which word order is smoothed out to be more readable. The only difference is that authors today usually rearrange the words into a Latin-inspired word order. In my tiered reader, The Lover’s Curse, the last tier before the authentic text is the same text as the original but in a prose-inspired Latin word order. 

Closing remarks

This is not a comprehensive list of public domain tiered reader material – I’ll be saving one more public domain piece for part 4 of this post series. In an upcoming tiered reader, we will see that a certain author is indeed using a Latin adaptation in the public domain to form a middle tier for their soon-to-be-published tiered reader. More details to follow!

P.S.: On Saturday I’ll be sending out free digital copies of my tiered reader book, The Lover’s Curse: A Tiered Reader of Aeneid 4 to everyone on my Latin email newsletter list. Subscribe here to receive your free digital copy this weekend!