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This series of Latin
classics was edited and first published under the orders of the French royal family
Dauphin, with the goal of giving their heirs
(Louis XIV in particular) a
proper education in the classics. Whatever the faults of this series, textual
or otherwise (many of the naughty parts were expurgated, hence the pejorative
meaning of “ad usum delphini” in the Romance languages), the overall method
is a good one. These editions provide two types of assistance: commentary on
the background of the text, historical or otherwise; and it also provides a
helpful summary of the text. What is unique is that it is all entirely in
Latin! So if you come upon something you don’t understand in the text, you
can look over to the simplified Latin paraphrase for a more comprehensible
version. Or if you don’t know who a certain character is, you can look to the
commentary for the necessary background, again in Latin. Even when you are
“looking” things up, you never revert to your native language, so you
continue to improve your Latin, even when you are having trouble. This is
meant to imitate the tradition of classical instruction, which until very
recently was conducted entirely in Latin. Unfortunately, these books have
been long out of print, and only one scholar to my knowledge has bothered to
keep these editions alive in the form of useful modern texts (Waldo Sweet’s
edition of Aeneid 1 and 2, reprinted by Bolchazy-Carducci). Luckily, these
editions are now public domain, and Google Books and others have made them
available in electronic format. There is no better edition of the Latin
clasics for cultivating reading profiiciency—and they’re free!
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