Cicero Critical Editions?

PFamilias

New Member

Of course I know about The Latin Library, but how do y'all read Cicero? Daniel Petterson quoted one of his professors as saying that if you don't read a critical edition, you're "not really reading" the text... that's definitely extreme, but I know I'm missing things by just reading online and using my trusty L&S. Does anyone have a publisher/series or just a single text that they've found works well for them?

By the way, I'm as interested in Seneca (though I've found him easier than Cicero, so the critical edition is not as necessary) and other classical authors, if you have suggestions.

Thanks!
 
D

Deleted member 13757

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There is nothing wrong with the text published on The Latin Library. Errors if they exist don't really matter that much if at all.
 
B

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Does anyone have a publisher/series or just a single text that they've found works well for them?
I usually buy the Oxford editions if I want a critical edition.

There is nothing wrong with the text published on The Latin Library. Errors if they exist don't really matter that much if at all.
I've found the Latin Library to be confusing when you have a corrupted and incomplete text like in de re publica, at least if you want to do a close reading ... a critical edition gives you more overview there. It's ok for other texts, though ... unless they contain words written in Greek, which the website fails to display properly.
 
E

Etaoin Shrdlu

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Daniel Petterson quoted one of his professors as saying that if you don't read a critical edition, you're "not really reading" the text
I wonder if that goes back to the story of Eduard Fraenkel. There's a well-know story about how he had been gushing about Aristophanes enthusiastically, when his professor, Friedrich Leo, interrupted the flow by asking him what edition he used. When he named it, Leo said, 'Oh, you read Aristophanes without a critical apparatus.' And at that matter Fraenkel realised what it meant to be a scholar, or something like that.
 
 

rothbard

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rothbard

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Looks like the critical edition I linked in my previous post has been removed from archive.org since then. Anyway, it was this.
 
 

rothbard

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Apparently it was removed due to a mis-labelling issue (it was billed as vol. 3 of Cicero's speeches but was in fact a duplicate of vol 2). The first two volumes are still available here and here, respectively.
 

PFamilias

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Thank you all for your replies! Now I have several trails to pursue.
 

AoM

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Dyck and Shackleton Bailey are two names to know when it comes to Cicero.
 
 

Godmy

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As it was mentioned, when it comes to online resources, Google Books and archive.org provide you with scanned critical versions (at least those that are legally available today), but when it comes really to digital text, the Latin text itself converted to the electronic form, as it has been mentioned, both websites as perseus.tufts.edu and thelatinlibrary.com (+thousands others smaller webs that provide random famous Latin works, Wiki Source etc.) - albeit, as every modern text (by modern I mean accessible to a lay person pretty much since the invention of the book print, I don't mean scrolls and papyri etc,) they themselves come ALSO from a conversion of some critical edition and, aside from the fact that we don't know which one and don't have the apparatus criticus, perhaps the more serious problem with it is that those texts are converted by amateurs which means that they contain mistakes and sometimes you don't know whether it is a mistake caused by the conversion or whether it is "a kind/type of mistake" that would be present in the critical edition as a part of some form of reconstruction. The problem is the amateurs typically don't transcribe it by hand, but they use various picture-reading software to create texts from PDFs, scans of book and such, which often induces errors. Then they often go over the text one more time at least to correct for some obvious mistake, but it is a difficult task for one person who does it in their free time to make a flawless transcription.

There is, however, at least one more alternative when it comes to TRANSCRIBED (digital) text and that is PHI LATIN TEXTS.

And now I realized I made this post once already into the "Grammar tips section" and how come it hasn't been linked already :-/ THREAD: reliable-digitized-latin-texts-on-the-internet-how-to-perform-a-corpus-search
 
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Godmy

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What many beginners often don't realize when they hear the term "criticial edition" for the first time is that it, in fact, means:

"An evidence-based reconstruction of how the text probably looked like in its latest surviving Roman transcription/copy somewhere from the 4th-6th century + a conjecture how that itself may have differed from the e.g. 1st century BC original."

(and the fact is that none of us has ever [seriously] laid our eyes upon anything else but a criticial edition (digital or physical) anytime we attempted to read some ancient text albeit without the apparatus criticus. None of us has ever read one of the real "medieval sources for the text"... a parchment, a scroll... etc. And the fact also is that the criticial editions are more accurate since it is an intelligent reconstruction from all surviving "medieval sources" that would differ from each other. As the Biblical scholars often say: the Bible you may read today is more accurate than the Bible you would read 400 years ago :p)
 
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PFamilias

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@Godmy

Thanks for the help! I already use thelatinlibrary often, especially if I'm looking up a specific sentence or paragraph and I know about where it is, but I have a hard time reading for a long time on the computer. I was hoping for physical copies, and you guys have given some great advice.

As an autodidact, I really miss out on a lot that anyone who has had formal training just picks up. Anyway, I guess that's why they have fora. ;)
 
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