Bryn Mawr Classical Review

As authors of Horace: A Legamus Transitional Reader, we would like to offer a very brief response to the review of our book by John Aveline in order to make a few corrections. While we are delighted that the reviewer thinks "[t]here is a great deal which recommends this book," the continuation of his sentence, "to its target market of high school Latin students and teachers," is misleading. We do indeed hope the high school market will make use of the book, but it is equally targeted at the transitional reader at the college level. To ensure its usefulness for both levels, we piloted the text at five institutions, two colleges and three high schools (see p. xvii for the names of the institutions and pilot teachers). The reviewer states that words like "sum" "scarcely warrant inclusion" in the pull-out vocabulary, but the introduction to that vocabulary clearly explains why such a word is there: the words were chosen for their high frequency in Horace's Odes and Satires and their high frequency in Latin, more generally (cf. p. xiv under "Vocabulary" as well). The reviewer states (note 2) that all of the Reader's Latin selections can be found in our A Horace Workbook. In fact the material from the satires does not overlap. The Workbook covers Satires 1.9, while the Reader under review includes selections from Satires 1.4 and 1.6. Finally, our practice of referring the student at times to other examples within the book of Horace's use of a particular figure of speech rather than to the appendix of figures should not be seen as an inconsistency but rather as an attempt to develop the student's sense of repeated use of particular figures in Horace.