Cicero First Catiline – an edition with lots of help

A card through the door today from Bolchazy-Carducci sent me to their website to investigate their book and DVD on the First Catilinarian.

Sample pages of the book are here.

It gives running vocab and syntax notes (“a skillful mix of hints, explanations, and brief translations of impossibly difficult clauses.”)

The edition, first published in 1997, is designed for intermediate students, and the reviewer (Dale Grote, University of North Carolina) said he used it with second year Latinists.

Perhaps this edition would be good particularly for independent learners, as i does give a great deal of help.

The DVD has, according to the description, five hours of video lectures which “illustrate how to translate every sentence of Cicero’s In Catilinam I without actually translating the sentence.” They use an interactive white-board to analyse ever sentence of the speech.

The website says:

• Live lectures using computerized whiteboard technology analyzing every sentence of the speech
  » parts of sentences highlighted in color
  » arrows linking adjectives to the nouns they modify
  » speech bubbles that identify the part of speech or use of certain words
  » example sentences that appear between the lines of the text when a grammatical concept is presented using an English sentence
• Word lists divided by frequency and parts of speech for study and review
• Line-by-line concordance

Again, this looks ideal for independent learners.