Someone recommended it to me.Glad I'm not the oneHow come you choose that for your first text? Not a very common choice, I wager, and certainly not a very easy one.
Which prose Classical Latin author do/did you find most difficult?
- Thread starter Callaina
- Start date
Entirety.
How do people find Boethius? Came to think of him when I saw Callaina's quote. Have heard some rank him among the hardest ever... I know he's not a "classical" author, strictly speaking.
Just curious, since I'm quite interested in ancient philosophy.
Just curious, since I'm quite interested in ancient philosophy.
Quite difficult based on the few excerpts I've looked at (from De Consolatione Philosophiae) though perhaps this is just as much due to the (at times intricate) philosophical nature of the work. I have a copy of De Consolatione Philosophiae sitting on my shelf and have picked it up now and again, but not in the focused way I'd need to if I was really going to tackle it, or even part of it.
Lucius Aelius
Linguistics Hippie
- Civis Illustris
- Patronus
Location:
Greensburgus, Carolina Septentrionalis
Sallust, of those I've read. His prose is probably not exceedingly difficult on the face of it, but the way he presents his writing gives me the impression that he thinks in a very different way from me, and I so often I read what he's writing and it takes me a while to figure out what he means.
So am I -- what philosophers do you most enjoy?
Though I have read it in (a very good) English translation; in fact it was part of what inspired me to learn Latin.
I haven't read all of the authors in the poll, and certainly not all extensively, but I have read some Caesar, Cicero, Livy, the tiniest bit of Pliny the Younger that my teacher gave me to look at, and Seneca Minor. Of these the most difficult is, I find, Livy. He just has so many clauses that I get lost in them, so I have to slowly go through it, whereas I can read Caesar more easily, though by no means fluently.
Are you studying Latin in school/university right now?
Yeah, I just finished my second year of high school Latin. But I've been "ahead of the class" (most of them are taking it because of an obligation from parents, the "prestige" of Latin or whatever else and not love for the subject) for a while now, and I've taught myself a lot of Latin. My teacher, having gone through the same experience himself as a student, has been helping me along to explore the wondrous world of Latin. Next year (the third year) is the one where the curriculum first introduces unaltered Latin (Caesar and Vergil, as most schools seem to do), so I'm excited for that.
No kidding!
Second year and you're doing Livy? That's remarkable.
They do, but Livy and Caesar are probably enough on their own without introducing two more in there.
Hm... Not sure if Livy seems more or less intriguing after reading all this. So he's got a very tough and strenuous style, but is he worth the pain? If been looking at some excerpts of Florus' Epitome of Roman Wars, which is pretty much a compilation of Livy's accounts, and he's both (relatively) easy and fun to read. He's quite bombastic and dramatic, which is (in my opinion) fun, but then I have heard he's quite unreliable as a historian.
Well, I have in fact hardly read anything of ancient philosophy as of yet, so my interest is mostly a curious one... The Somnium Scipionis got me interested in (among other things) the ancients' view of metaphysics and the nature and existence of the soul, which are topics I want to read more about, both from pagan and early Christian perspectives (such as Augustine & Aquinas). Boethius, from what I've heard, is almost like a mediator between ancient pagan and Christian views, which seems very interesting to me. And then his work was extremely popular and formative in the Middle Ages, which is also a field of great interest to me.
Which book is that from?