Best books to read in Latin

>>9565292
i don't know shit but i'm pretty sure medieval latin that the vulgate bible was written in is different from classical latin. in terms of classical latin people always talk about reading classics like virgil or ovid, although poetry is presumably hard. ceasar's writings on his military campaigns are supposed to be a good introduction, and apparently cicero was a huge part of latin education for ages.

souce: i once contemplated learning latin for five seconds and then i went back to masturbating

Return it, drop Latin and learn all the Ancient Greeks instead. Ex lingua stulta veniunt incommoda multa.

>>9565292
I know both greek and latin and I'll tell you this: drop latin and learn greek, greek literature is way better and you get also the philosophers.

Oh, and you will never be able to read fluently a latin book without translation and a lot of footnotes.

Latin is worth learning, if you really have a lot of time, just for Vergilius, Lucretius and Augustine then you may check out Horatius, Ovidius, Catullus, Tacitus, Petronius, et cetera but surely there are much better works in your mother tongue, heck, most of latin literature is studied just for its historical interest.

>>9565523
>Oh, and you will never be able to read fluently a latin book without translation and a lot of footnotes.
How is it in anyway diferent from greek?

>>9565552
It is not much different from greek, if you are able to read greek fluently you definitely can learn latin as well, it's just too difficult for most of the people

>>9565570
No, I mean, how hard is to a full grown person to learn greek? How much time? What books? Is it worth it?

Don't listen to the two idiots talking about Greek. The first one is memeing and the second is giving a fringe perspective.

If you're going to learn both Latin and Greek, you want Latin first because learning it is like Greek Lite. If you had to pick only one of them, Latin would still win by a massive landslide because it has 500x more texts and periods and authors and EVERYTHING for you to actually read. And you can see whether you like it way earlier, instead of spending a year even getting to the point where you can read a real text (as with Greek).

Stick with the textbook for a while. The ideal text that you want while learning Latin from a textbook is:
- something relatively meaty, so you can read lots of it and get lots of redundant practice
- something that hovers RIGHT at your present skill level, so it's simultaneously fluid and fun (for motivation+reward), and difficult enough that you have to apply the things you've learned actively and put thm to use
- related to the above, strikes a balance between using vocab you're familiar with, and introducing new vocab steadily so you aren't painstakingly dictionary'ing your way through every sentence
- also related to the above, something that only uses grammatical constructs you've already learned so far.

This last one is the most important. You don't want to have half of Latin 101 grammar in your head, then try reading a real text, and not know what the fuck is going on for 80% of the sentences you see, because they all involve a) constructions you don't recognise, b) constructions where you aren't even sure IF they're what you think they are, because you don't know what other possibilities are out there.

The best possible way to achieve all of this is to stick with a textbook for the 101 period, until you have the vast majority of basic Latin grammar simply In Your Head. This is because the textbook is specially designed to select or construct text exercises that balance all these elements, while carefully snipping out things that would throw you off (like a bizarre, rare use of the subjunctive appearing in an otherwise easy passage of Caesar).

Once you've done that, THEN you go dive into real texts - and then there's an initial period of "sink or swim" because the text is obviously much less hand-holdy, and you have to get used to things sometimes being Level 100 difficulty in an otherwise evenly Level 30 Difficulty text. But that's something that happens even to Latinists who have been reading it since childhood, because authors are just fucking weird. Remember, it even happens with books in your own native language sometimes - 'what the fuck is he even saying here?' That's when you get side-by-side translations so you can go along at your own pace and look at the translation when you're totally lost, or to confirm whether your translation was correct. Or use special annotated readers. Caesar has a lot of good ones out there, Bristol publishers I think has some good ones.

>>9565579
Greek is really really fucking hard and it takes a long time. It's basically the initial phase of learning Latin, where you're mostly memorising tables of conjugations and declensions, uses of prepositions and grammatical moods, etc., but prolonged for way too long.

Compared to Latin, it takes forever to start actually reading Greek, the morphology is a lot less simplified, there are a lot more "yep, you just have to memorize this whole fucking 20 pages of shit." Because Latin is like this too, just a lot less, and a lot of the concepts are transferrable from Latin to Greek, it really helps to learn Latin first.

Once you actually do learn all the painful shit, though, a lot of Greek prose is actually more formulaic and therefore easier than Latin.

Also: Greek has a much more restricted set of texts. Learning Latin is arguably a good idea for anybody with humanistic interests, but Greek is for specialists or for people who have a serious dedication to humanist studies for their own sake. It's just not necessary - there's no point to spending 2-3 years learning a language just to read Plato, when by "read Plato" you actually mean "shittily translate Plato while checking it against a really good scholarly English translation anyway."

>>9565292
I myself have a Latin textbook and plan on reading it eventually. The Latin works that I plan on studying once I've learned Latin are Ovid's metamorphoses, Virgil's Aeneid, Cicero, Julius Caesar, and the Vulgate bible.

>>9565619
And what about The Illiad/Odissey?

Yeah OP I'm >>9565523 and after having read >>9565600 I changed my mind, I realised that it is much more easy for a beginner to start with latin even if the point about latin literature being inferior still stands. I have studied greek and latin in school for five years and then continued on my own, obviously I can't ask you to do the same...

As for the bible, you can read some of Hieronymous' work, but it is from fourth/fifth century and I don't think it will add a lot to what you can already read in English.

>>9565292

Read translations you nonce.

Well, I've been on a classical languages kick for only a few months, but I would say that I already have a pretty high level of proficiency with Latin. I picked up Greek a few weeks ago. I think what several others have said is pretty much right: it's unwise to go at Greek without already having a good deal of Latin under your belt. There is an enormous richness to Latin literature--indeed, the catalogue of lesser-known late Latin authors in A Rebours is what motivated me to get serious about learning the language--and so it is not just a stepping stone to Greek. In my experience, Greek is just as complex as Latin (and indeed there are some additional and very foreign grammatical concepts that crop up in Greek but not in Latin, such as the nuanced differences between imperfect/progressive and aorist aspect, or what the hell is even going on with so-called middle voice--which things are great fun for me, but I'm sure not for most people) but with a level of irregularity comparable to a Germanic language. It doesn't help that there is no Greek textbook of comparable quality to Wheelock's Latin. I'm using Greek: An Intensive Course, which is quite good, but may be "too comprehensive" for most people. It claims to be accessible even to people without Latin, but I would say it would be overwhelming to someone who hasn't learned an inflected language before unless they are both very dedicated and very intelligent. I was previously using a Greek primer for free on the Internet Archive from like 1912 written for the secondary school level, which was also pretty good and in smaller chunks than the Quinn book, but basically required previous knowledge of the Latin forms. Then you have the fact that, if you want to access the full wealth of Greek literature, you have to learn a few different dialects (Attic, Homeric, Ionic, and Koine, at a minimum; the dialects of the Attic prose writers and the dramatic poets are also somewhat different, from what I understand). I'm not sure how different they are from each other, but that's yet another complicating factor; Latin was already a highly standardized language by the time of the Golden Age. And Latin does change substantially over time, but that tends to be in the direction of simplification, as you might expect. Only go straight for Greek if you just feel like you're gonna die unless you can read a certain author in the original.

>>9565343
>latinae lingua
>lingua stulta

occidite

>>9565732
>the catalogue of lesser-known late Latin authors in A Rebours is what motivated me to get serious about learning the language

That short chapter where he dilates on his favourite Latin authors could motivate anybody to learn Latin, jesus

I've been told that Caesars writings (particularly on the war in gaul) are quite easy reading and something a lot of people start with.

>>9565794
"Quite easy reading" means you still have to do months (probably years if you are not autistically dedicated or adept at studying latin) of practice before being able to appreciate it.