Methodology

  Healthy debate regarding the “optimal” method of teaching Latin has reinvigorated the field of classical-language pedagogy over the last decade. Informed by the principle of comprehensible input, one new medium that has emerged within that time frame is the Latin novella. Composed in Latin ranging from novice-low to intermediate, these novellas present simple stories, usually accompanied by graphics of some sort, that may be consumed in considerably less time than authentic literary readings from the more traditional canon. In so doing, they endow their readers with a confidence and sense of accomplishment almost entirely lacking from the often painstaking process of reading the more polished and nuanced Latin most typically found in our highest-level courses. I have used such novellas to good effect myself and, having long considered contributing to their number, decided this was the perfect opportunity to do so!

Another new teaching medium that has emerged alongside novellas is that of tiered readings. According to this principle, a teacher pares down the grammatical complexity of a more difficult passage into a syntactically simpler one that may be consumed more quickly, thereby employing the same basic comprehensible input thesis as does novellas. But there are several key differences. In the first place, there are usually multiple versions (or tiers) of the same story, each building in complexity upon the previous. As one progresses from the novice version, through the intermediate one, and ultimately to the advanced (unadapted) text, they are aided by familiarity with the story. Multiple iterations of the same story also allow for repetition, an essential feature of both the consolidation and acquisition processes. Recognizing the merits of this approach, I have been meaning to experiment with it myself. This is my first attempt!

I began by collating passages from ancient Greek literature that comment on women in athletics in general, including all those that treat the stories of Cynisca and Callipatira. The main authors on this list are Xenophon, Plutarch, and Pausanias. I then translated all the most essential passages from Greek into Latin, doing my best simultaneously to hew as closely as possible to the original Greek and to render it into idiomatic classical Latin using the full range of that language. Any infelicities that may have arisen in reconciling the two are entirely my responsibility. If you happen to notice any, please contact me so I can correct, amend, and/or improve them. In order to stitch them all together (and, in so doing, present a lesson on the reliability of “historical” sources written centuries after their subject material), I drafted a narrative into which I wove all the original passages. I present a trilingual edition of this most advanced tier, necessarily only bilingual for the narrative passages I composed myself.

My next task was to create an intermediate tier. As this was my first foray into tiering, I had to decide where exactly on the admittedly vast intermediate spectrum I would pitch it. So when a colleague alerted me to the presence of a pared-down treatment of the Cynisca and Callipatira (a.k.a. Pherenice) stories among the short readings in chapter 25 of the relatively new Suburani Latin textbook series, I realized that there was an opportunity to provide an expanded version of these women’s stories as an additional resource to complement this particular phase of the intermediate level. And whereas I did not restrict myself to Suburani’s vocabulary, I did try to avoid most of the higher-level syntactical constructions not yet encountered by students as of chapter 25 in that series. When feasible and convenient, I also tried to reinforce the grammatical structures presented in that and the immediately preceding chapters, which included most prominently nouns of the fourth declension, indirect commands and indirect questions–but only in secondary sequence. For those unfamiliar with Suburani, primary sequence subjunctive verbs are not encountered until the third volume of the series (chapter 25 being in book two). All constructions using gerund(ive)s and supines were likewise avoided. While my intermediate tier is thus especially well-suited to this particular juncture in the Suburani series, it can be utilized to good effect by teachers of intermediate Latin using any system, from CI, to the reading method, to grammar-and-translation. Because the intermediate tier digresses significantly from the original Greek, I present only a bilingual Latin-English edition.

I next turned my attention to the novice tier, which I decided to do in the form of a digital novella that I would make free to the public at the click of a link (as are, incidentally, all of these resources). I created my Cynisca novella using StoryJumper, strutting a bare-bones version of the Latin story with both backgrounds and other images to help convey meaning without resorting to direct glossing in a manner not dissimilar to that of Lingua Latina per se Illustrata. Necessarily, most of the details from the original Greek sources are no longer in evidence in this novice tier; indeed, in some ways, the finished product is less a novice tier to the intermediate and advanced ones (which mirror each other very closely), and more an independent novella that shares a theme, plot points, and some basic vocabulary with them.