By Karl Frerichs

Description

This annotated Latin text of Cicero’s First Catilinarian Oration is designed to be used in both college and high school classes. Frerichs provides essential same- and facing-page vocabulary and grammatical assistance students need to be able to read and comprehend one of Cicero’s most famous speeches. Lines of the Latin text are individually numbered for easy reference. An historical narrative introduces the oration. This edition is a favorite teaching tool for teachers of every experience level.

Special Features

• Introduction to historical context of Cicero’s speech
• Complete, unadapted Latin text of In Catilinam I
• Same- and facing-page vocabulary and notes
• Complete vocabulary
• Glossary of Terms and Figures of Speech
• 2 maps
• 4 black-and-white illustrations
• Bibliography

Author Bio

Karl Frerichs teaches Latin and Greek at University School in Hunting Valley, Ohio.

Comments and Reviews

Bolchazy-Carducci adds another volume to its spread of intermediate Latin readers, which now number more than 20 according to its 1998 catalog. Frerichs’ Cicero’s First Catilinarian Oration follows the standard setup: brief historical introduction, facing vocabulary, additional help with the syntax splayed out under the text and vocabulary, a dictionary, and a brief bibliography in the back. The book is remarkably sturdy and ought to survive a couple of years of classroom use—important for public school adoption. A nice addition is a glossary of technical terms for rhetorical figures that make it easier to talk about the complex geometries of Ciceronian prose. A careful reading of the book uncovered only one typo.

If I have a complaint, it is that Frerichs’ texts, notes, and vocabulary omit the macrons. Surely students will have to be weaned off of them sooner or later, but I would have preferred later. Perhaps a compromise position could have been to include macrons only on critical case endings, which look the same without them: the first declension ablative singular, for example.

So much for the preliminaries. Does the book work? Do Frerichs’ notes help clear the way to an understanding and perhaps an appreciation for Cicero’s Latin? Frerichs is clearly well acquainted with the peculiar challenges of the intermediate class, where half the students are likely to answer ‘Dative?’ when asked for the tense of a verb and the other half is ready to revolt if they have to decline hic, haec, hoc again. The temptation to re-teach first semester Latin at each new word must be avoided just as much as its obverse of glossing over some real needs.

The running vocabulary is generous-—perhaps too generous. Chasing down vocabulary should be just painful enough to encourage students to try to think through their words before they start flipping pages in the dictionary. Precious little is learned about the form vacuefecisses, for example, if students can pick out vacuefacio and its translation just by moving their eyes a couple of inches to the facing page. It also makes class recitation more a matter of eyeball gymnastics than a demonstration, review, and reinforcement of what students are supposed to be learning about Latin. This is not a criticism of Frerichs specifically, but of the whole idea of abundant, facing vocabulary. (Perhaps Bolchazy-Carducci could be persuaded to include a complete, un-annotated text of the Latin for classroom work and tests at the end of their readers.)

Frerichs’ syntactical notes are a skillful mix of hints, explanations, and brief translations of impossibly difficult clauses. As a way of preparing this review, I used his book in a second-year Latin class. My students were never without necessary help, but never were they overwhelmed. Even where his notes were not quite all that some of the students needed, Frerichs enabled them to ask intelligent questions about their problems. His historical comments, while necessarily brief, provided us with convenient points of departure for fuller class discussions. Frerichs’ text accomplishes precisely what a book of this sort should. I hope he takes time to write more of them.

— Dale Grote
University of North Carolina, Charlotte
1997

Karl Frerichs’s new commentary on Cicero’s First Catilinarian Oration is an important contribution to the growing list of Ciceroniana. Students can now read the whole speech with the essential vocabulary and grammar assistance they need. The format of the information on the page makes it more comfortable to read and review the Latin text. A historical narrative introduces the oration, and complicated details of fact and interpretation do not obtrude or overwhelm the first-time reader. The text is suitable for those who are teaching Cicero for the first time as well as the seasoned Ciceronian pedagogue.

— Robert W. Cape, Jr.
From the Foreword

. . . If the students follow [Frerichs’s] advice, they will see the point, understand the situation and the burden placed on Cicero the speaker to deliver a clear, persuasive case to the senators. This attention to the point, how history and grammar combine in the speech to make a passionate case, makes this an excellent school text and even qualifies it for use beyond Third Year Latin.

— David Conti
Polytechnic Preparatory Country Day School, Brooklyn, NY

. . . a perfect text for a third-year high school class or a third-semester college course. I have used it successfully with both on-level and honors high school classes. Its alphabetized, facing vocabulary and clearly written commentary make it easy for students to focus on the Latin since they are freed from the tedious task of looking up words . . . I wholeheartedly recommend this text to students, faculty, and especially to lovers of Latin who want to read Cicero for pleasure.

— Deborah McInnes
Vanderbilt University