Selections from Viri Romae
Selections from Viri Romae is a Latin reader compiled in the eighteenth century by Charles François Lhomond, a celebrated teacher at the University of Paris, and presented here in the 1896 American Book Company edition edited by Robert Arrowsmith and Charles Knapp. Drawing chiefly on Livy and Eutropius, it retells the early legends and history of Rome—its founding heroes, its kings, and the men whose deeds shaped the young republic—in Latin that Lhomond deliberately simplified in vocabulary and construction to suit beginners. This edition supplies an introduction, footnotes, grammatical references, exercises, and a full vocabulary, and prints the text twice, once stripped of apparatus and once as originally set.
Beyond grammar drill, the book embodies a conviction that Latin study should cultivate breadth, sympathy, and judgment rather than mere mechanical recitation. By introducing students through vivid, character-rich stories instead of dry military narrative, it aims to awaken genuine interest in classical literature and the life of a great people. Its enduring popularity testifies to that humane ideal of education.
How it begins
If any of these characters do not display properly—in particular, if the diacritic does not appear directly above the letter—or if the apostrophes and quotation marks in this paragraph appear as garbage, you may have an incompatible browser or unavailable fonts. First, make sure that the browser’s “character set” or “file encoding” is set to Unicode (UTF-8). You may also need to change your browser’s default font. There is no Greek in this book. For this e-text, the Selections are given twice, in “stripped” and as-printed form. In the stripped form, all footnote anchors, page and line numbers have been omitted, along with macrons, illustrations and sidenotes, leaving only the original Viri Romae text. The book as printed includes several hundred cross-references to footnotes identified by page number, and to text passages identified by line number. Line numbers (by multiples of 5) are shown in the left margin; footnote numbering starts from 1 on each page. Words split across line or page breaks may appear on either the first or second line, depending on space. Contents Introduction Viri Romae (“stripped” text) Viri Romae (as printed) Exercises Vocabulary Publisher’s Advertising The map of the Mediterranean area, shown here at the end of the Exercises, was printed as a foldout facing page 68 (middle of selection XXIII). larger view SELECTIONS FROM VIRI ROMAE EDITED BY ROBERT ARROWSMITH, Ph.D.
Text from Project Gutenberg, public domain.