In celebration of the upcoming launch of The Lover’s Curse: A Tiered Reader of Aeneid 4, I’m working my way through the history of published tiered texts. In the previous post (Part 1), I spoke about tiered texts that were old enough to be in the public domain.

The next chapter of the history is the 20^th century Latin textbook scene. In this era, it was reasonably common for textbook authors to produce abridged or adapted versions of stories from the Classical canon.

A well-known example would be Lingua Latina Per Se Illustrata, Pars II: Roma Aeterna, which presents the intermediate reader with prose paraphrases of authors such as Vergil and Livy, with some of the more elaborate and specialised words replaced with simpler synonyms. This is not, strictly speaking, a tiered reader, as the text only presents one tier, namely the adapted version. However, it is possible to read Roma Aeterna alongside the unadapted text as a guide to the meaning, thus creating two tiers. And there may be a time-delayed tiered-reading effect from reading adaptations: some readers anecdotally report that their memory of reading the adapted excerpts of the Aeneid in Roma Aeterna helped them understand the original version of the text even though the readings of the two versions were separated in time.  

Here is a comparison between the language level of Roma Aeterna and the opening lines of Vergil’s fourth book of the Aeneid:

Adapted:
At rēgīna iam caecō amōre flagrat. Magna virī virtūs et gentis honōs in animō versātur, vultus verbaque haerent fīxa in pectore, neque cūra membrīs placidam quiētem dat.

Original:
At regina gravi iamdudum saucia cura
vulnus alit venis et caeco carpitur igni.
multa viri virtus animo multusque recursat
gentis honos; haerent infixi pectore vultus
verbaque nec placidam membris dat cura quietem.

As you can see from the example above, the adapted version uses prose word order and replaces some of the less-literal words with more concrete vocabulary (the adaptation reads ‘caeco amore flagrat’: the queen ‘burns with hidden love’, a relatively straightforward statement, while the original leans further into the fire imagery instead of plainly naming the feeling as love: ‘caeco carpitur igni’, the queen ‘is plucked at/consumed by a hidden fire’).

Next up, I should mention that if anyone is interested in reading Ovid’s Metamorphoses in Latin, it would be good idea to leaf through Latin Via Ovid (first published 1982, a relatively early example of the reader-style textbooks). This book can be borrowed for viewing on archive.org here. Latin Via Ovid was designed as an introductory course to the Latin language via stories adapted from Ovid’s writings. Many of these myths, taken from the Metamorphoses, share a theme of transformation as their unifying trait, but are otherwise quite diverse.

The textbook starts with very heavily adapted stories (very bare, skeleton retellings of the myth), but soon adopts more and more of the structure, vocabulary, and syntax of its source. In the later chapters it stops presenting adaptations, instead presenting the original text unmodified but with copious English footnotes. And so it is in the middle chapters that we can find some interesting Latin narrative adaptations which could serve as lower tiers for passages of Ovid.

Here is a screenshot of the opening lines of Latin Via Ovid’s Orpheus and Eurydice adaptation:

And here are the lines in the original (Ovid, Metamorphoses 10.1-10):

Inde per inmensum croceo velatus amictu

aethera digreditur Ciconumque Hymenaeus ad oras

tendit et Orphea nequiquam voce vocatur.

adfuit ille quidem, sed nec sollemnia verba

nec laetos vultus nec felix attulit omen.

fax quoque, quam tenuit, lacrimoso stridula fumo

usque fuit nullosque invenit motibus ignes.

exitus auspicio gravior: nam nupta per herbas

dum nova Naiadum turba comitata vagatur,

occidit in talum serpentis dente recepto.

Much of the rich description of the god of marriage, Hymen (veiled in a saffron-yellow cloak and stepping down from the heavens), is simply omitted rather than explained in simpler language. But some of the paraphrasing retains an echo of the original: the tricolon of ‘neither auspicious words, happy expressions, nor a lucky omen’ (nec sollemnia verba nec laetos vultus nec felix… omen) is truncated into ‘neither happy words nor a lucky omen’ (nec verba laeta nec omen felix), retaining the adjective for ‘happy’ (laetos) and the noun ‘words’ (verba) and making them agree. The adapted version will not explain everything from the original, but reading the adaptation will provide an outline of the plot which helps reduce some of the cognitive load in reading the original.  

Another textbook worth mentioning here is the Oxford Latin Course, even if because it is the only one in the 20^th century (as far as I am aware) to explicitly encourage a tiered reading approach. In chapter 42 and 46, adapted versions of authentic texts are placed immediately before the texts themselves and thus attempt to ease the transition to reading unadapted Latin.

Here are two short excerpts, one from each of those chapters:

Oxford Latin Course Part 3, Ch42: ‘Quīntus Pompēiī reditum carmine celebrat’:

Adapted:
ō Pompei, saepe mēcum tempus in ultimum dēducte, Brūtō mīlitae duce, quis tē redōnāvit Quirītem dīs patriīs Italōque caelō, Pompei, prīme meōrum sodālium?

Original:
ō saepe mēcum tempus in ultimum

dēducte Brūtō mīlitiae duce,

              quis tē redōnāvit Quirītem

                           dīs patriīs Italōque caelō,

Oxford Latin Course Part 3, Ch46 ‘Fōns Bandusiae’

Adapted:

gelida aqua, splendidior vitrō, ē cavīs saxīs dēsiliēbat in lacūnam, unde rīvus lēnī murmure in vallem fluēbat. super fontem erat īlex alta quae umbram grātam praebēbat et hominibus et pecoribus.

Original:

ō fōns Bandusiae, splendidior vitrō,

… fīēs nōbilium tū quoque fontium,

mē dīcente cavīs impositam īlicem

saxīs, unde loquācēs

              lymphae dēsiliunt tuae.

Ch42 only presents a prose paraphrase without replacing any of the vocabulary, and Ch46 presents an adapted narrative re-using many of the words of the poem in a similar description of the spring of Bandusia. Having taught from the Oxford Latin Course for about five years, I find that students still tend to find Horace’s poetry very difficult at this stage in their learning. This is especially a problem in Ch43, which is also only the second time the students have met substantial excerpts from poetry. Ch43’s lower tier only helps with word order, so there is a swarm of English glosses in the long margin next to the story to explain the unadapted vocabulary. The experience of reading Ch43’s poem – in both the adaptation and original – feels more like stringing together English glosses than actually reading Latin poetry in Latin. I have written additional tiers for my students for Ch43, and found that sure enough, replacing some of the harder words with more familiar ones before reading the more difficult tiers helped smooth out the difficulty curve.

(As a side note, many teachers prefer to completely skip the poetic sections in the Oxford Latin Course rather than struggle through them. I’ve tried both including and skipping them, and in my experience, including them with added support in the form of tiered adaptations is a better solution than either skipping them or only reading them as-printed.)

This summary is probably only scratching the surface of what adaptations of Classical texts existed in 20^th century textbooks. If you remember any adapted texts from your Latin textbooks, you might find it pleasant to re-read those alongside their source texts and see which parts the authors omitted, modified, or kept intact.

I hope you’re enjoying this series on tiered readers! I’ll look forward to seeing you at the livestream launch party if you’re free this weekend!

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!