Mathew Owen

Ovid Unseens provides a bank of 80 practice passages of Latin verse, half elegiac and half hexameter. Taken from across Ovid's works, including the Metamorphoses, Fasti, Heroides, Amores and Tristia, the passages help build students' knowledge and confidence in a notoriously difficult element of Latin language learning. Every passage begins with an introduction, outlining the basic story and theme of the passage, followed by a 'lead-in' sentence, paraphrasing the few lines before the passage begins. The first set of passages are translation exercises of 12-16 lines, each accompanied by a Discendum box which highlights a key feature of poetic Latin, equipping students further with the skills to tackle ever more difficult verse passages at first sight. These are followed by longer passages with scansion exercises and questions on comprehension and stylistic analysis, replicating unseen verse exam questions in full. The comprehensive introduction provides an overview of Ovid's life and work, an account of some of the stylistic features of his poetry, and practical help in the form of tips on how to approach the more challenging lines of Latin verse and produce a fluent translation. A step-by-step guide to scansion, with practice exercises and answers, covers the essential principles for scanning lines of Latin verse, from the basics of understanding syllables, feet and types of metres, to coping with elision and caesurae. A guideline verse vocabulary list is provided which covers words particularly common in Ovid's works. Broken down into small 'checklists', each corresponding to a group of four passages, the vocabulary is learnt cumulatively and as it is encountered.

Practice Passages for Latin Verse Translation and Comprehension

Ovid Unseens

This volume is designed to accompany the OCR A-Level specification in Latin (first teaching September 2016), with practice unseen passages from Livy, the set prose for Paper 1, together with passages from a selection of other writers to support Paper 2, for which no author is set. A bank of 80 passages aims to take Sixth Form students from the level of heavily adapted post-GCSE ('AS'-equivalent) passages and develop their knowledge and skills to reach A-Level standard. But this is not just a book of unseen passages: there is a chronological progression through the unseens in order to give the reader a sense of the narrative of Roman history, exploring key events through the words of original texts. Every passage begins with an introduction, outlining the basic content of the passage, followed by a 'lead-in' sentence, paraphrasing the few lines before the passage begins. Part 1 passages are straight translation exercises on the model of the A-Level Paper 1. They also feature, however, a 'Discendum' box, highlighting a facet of Latin prose with which students may not be familiar, or extension questions on grammar and style. Part 2 passages are accompanied by questions on comprehension, translation and grammar, replicating the demands of Paper 2 in full. An extensive word list is provided in the form of checklists which build the reader's knowledge of the most commonly occurring words and phrases in Latin prose. The passages are punctuated with discussions of Roman history during the periods covered in the passages, and a comprehensive introduction includes portraits of the authors featured in the book, as well as grammatical reminders to help readers deal with both the trickier elements of unseen prose and with A-Level grammatical analysis questions.

A Guide through Roman History

Prose Unseens for A-Level Latin

Ovid

A collection of passages for students to practice their unseen verse Latin translation and comprehension skills.

Ingo Gildenhard

e emperor Nero is etched into the Western imagination as one of ancient Rome's most infamous villains, and Tacitus' Annals have played a central role in shaping the mainstream historiographical understanding of this flamboyant autocrat. This section of the text plunges us straight into the moral cesspool that Rome had apparently become in the later years of Nero's reign, chronicling the emperor's fledgling stage career including his plans for a grand tour of Greece; his participation in a city-wide orgy climaxing in his publicly consummated 'marriage' to his toy boy Pythagoras; the great fire of AD 64, during which large parts of central Rome went up in flames; and the rising of Nero's 'grotesque' new palace, the so-called 'Golden House', from the ashes of the city. This building project stoked the rumours that the emperor himself was behind the conflagration, and Tacitus goes on to present us with Nero's gruesome efforts to quell these mutterings by scapegoating and executing members of an unpopular new cult then starting to spread through the Roman empire: Christianity. All this contrasts starkly with four chapters focusing on one of Nero's most principled opponents, the Stoic senator Thrasea Paetus, an audacious figure of moral fibre, who courageously refuses to bend to the forces of imperial corruption and hypocrisy. This course book offers a portion of the original Latin text, study aids with vocabulary, and a commentary. Designed to stretch and stimulate readers, Owen's and Gildenhard's incisive commentary will be of particular interest to students of Latin at both A2 and undergraduate level. It extends beyond detailed linguistic analysis and historical background to encourage critical engagement with Tacitus' prose and discussion of the most recent scholarly thought.

Mathew Owen

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