/lit/ - Literature

If you can't into Latin, just read Dryden's translation of the Aeneid and Golding's translation of the Metamorphoses

In my language novels are called "romans" so what you really are asking is what are some recommended novel authors

>>5554175
are any of these other words in your language? Who are some recommended authors

>>5554175
Poets, playwrights, philosphers, old Italian niggas that wrote you semantic doof.

>>5554175
Unless otherwise noted, the official language in 4chan threads is English.

>>5554159
>Dryden's translation of the Aeneid

Cicero and Plutarch?

I actually have no idea what I'm talking about but I always end up seeing the quotes of these 2 in various historical retellings of the stories of those periods. Historians would call them the "primary sources" I think.

>>5554245
>>5554159
>Golding's translation of the Metamorphoses
Is this bait

>>5555916

Cicero counts as a "primary source" for much of what he writes - he deals a lot (in his forensic oratory and correspondence) with contemporary figures and events. Plutarch not so much: he's a voluminous and varied writer, but some of his best known works - particularly the Parallel Lives (where he pairs a Greek and a Roman historical or legendary figure, gives a biography of each, and compares them) - deal with events long (up to multiple centuries) before he wrote, and for which he is himself relying on earlier, often lost, sources.

>>5554175
Bane?

>>5555960
>not liking golding's metamorphoses
is this bait?

>>5556011
>liking a translation of a Latin classic that uses rhyming and imagery such as gunshots
SHIGGIDY
H
I
G
G
I
D
Y

There was one whose name escapes me, started with an A, statue bust had a long flowing beard?

>>5556026
Trip faggot detected

>>5554114

This is defining "Roman" broadly, to include Greek authors of the Roman period who look back primarily to Greek literature, as well as Latin authors and Greek authors writing on Roman subjects. No doubt, there are omissions.

epic poetry:
Vergil, Aeneid
Ovid, Metamorphoses
Lucan, Bellum Civile (Civl War), a. k. a., Pharsalia
Valerius Flaccus, Argonautica
Statius, Thebaid and Achilleid
Silius Italicus, Punica
Quintus Smyrnaeus
Nonnos, Dionysiaca

lyric, elegiac, pastoral, and other shorter poetry, and epigram:
Catullus
Tibullus
Propertius
Horace (Odes, Epodes)
Ovid (Amores, Ars Amatoria, Remedia Amoris, Fasti, Tristia, Ex Ponto)
Vergil (Eclogues)
Martial
Calpurnius Siculus
Statius (Silvae)
Claudian
Phaedrus
Priapeia

didactic poetry:
Lucretius
Vergil (Georgics)
Ovid (Fasti, Ars Amatoria, Remedia Amoris)

satire:
Horace
Juvenal
Persius
Lucian
Apocolocyntosis (title of an anonymous work)

comic drama:
Terence
Plautus

tragedy:
Seneca

history / biography:
Sallust
Julius Caesar
Livy
Tacitus
Appian
Cassius Dio
Quintus Curtius Rufus
Polybius
Suetonius
Ammianus Marcellinus
Historia Augusta
Plutarch

philosophy:
Lucretius
Cicero
Seneca
Marcus Aurelius
Plutarch
Plotinus
St Augustine

prose fiction:
Apuleius (Metamorphoses)
Petronius
Chariton
Longus
Achilles Tatius
Xenophon of Ephesus
Heliodorus

letters:
Cicero
Pliny the Younger
Seneca

various non-fiction:
Pliny the Elder
Plutarch
Cicero
Quintilian
Vitruvius

>>5556059
>trying THIS hard

>>5556066
i'm going to recommend you be more like that anon and try like at least a tiny bit with your posts

Should one learn Latin? Im assuming since one would only want to develop reading comprehension it would be faster than learning a living language where speaking ability was valued.

>>5554175
In my language novel means "new" so what you really are asking is what are some recommended new authors.

>>5556026
>muh accuracy
>not caring that golding rendered ovid into absolutely beautiful verse
>not understanding translation at all

>>5556124
Golding's translation has little merit beyond the novelty of being ye olde quaint English. If I want that, I'll read something of high quality, like Chaucer or Langland. If I want Ovid, I'll read something less clumsy and rustic.

>>5556075

OTOH, the Latin one learns the language to read is, largely, sophisticated and literary, so acquiring the fluency to read the texts one really wants to read can take time. There are spoken Latin groups and events; and even online fora for communicating in Latin. So not everyone who learns it is only interested in reading. Indeed, prose (and sometimes verse) composition used to be a key skill in Latin learning, though that's diminished in role in many curricula.

>>5556059

Two obvious omissions: Diogenes Laertius, who wrote on the lives and thought of philosophers; and Macrobius' Saturnalia.

>>5556075
Good luck. Latin is extremely hard to learn, it's the polar opposite of the simplicity of the English language

>>5557268
>English
>Simple
There's like a billion words nigga

>>5557279
Memorizing words ain't shit. Grammar is the hard part, and Latin grammar makes English look like bloo bloo ga ga

>>5557268

Troll detected.

>>5556075

It's not really "extremely hard to learn". The core vocabulary needed to read the majority of ancient works is relatively small, and although the grammar is rather different from a very weakly inflected language like English, it has the merit of being highly regular. Greek is several orders of difficulty harder.

>>5557268
⇒Latin is extremely hard to learn

Only if you're linguistically impaired. If it was "hard to learn", it wouldn't be taught in 5th grade.

>>5556059

BTW, I realize giving such an extensive list is not really a direct answer to OP, but the point is, OP asked a very general question, and what one will want to read will depend on one's specific tastes and interests.

I assume OP might have some generic preferences, so I divided my list that way. Beyond that, one can look up the authors' names, and see which one might want to prioritize (e. g., if interested in myth, all of the Roman epics but Lucan and Silius will be of interest).

The thing is, most of the extant Roman era writers survive because, at some point, or for a very long time (as with Vergil), they have been considered important or influential: Statius was central in the middle ages, and for Dante, though his reputation declined in recent centuries before a very recent revival (last few decades); Ovid was popular, then not, then underwent serious revival, and so on.

People did not copy texts of several thousand lines (all of the epics) that they did not value; though of course some major works survive more or less by accident: the majority of Catullus' poems, widely considered a Latin masterpiece, owe their survival to a single manuscript; one of Cicero's major works survives only in a palimpsest (a manuscript that has been scraped off, rotated, and written over, but whose original contents can be recovered by various methods - various recently developed imaging techniques are making this even easier and more accurate).

>>5557713
Did you earn your doctorate on this subject? No sarcasm at all, to not only have all this knowledge but wield and adapted it at will to a form of question is good good stuff.

>>5556059
Not OP, but I'm stealing this on my computer.

>>5557268
Latin grammar is best foundational grammar. Harder than English, but what isn't harder than English grammar ?

>>5557296
You can work your way with three declensions (two of them being nearly identical) and three tenses if you have a good dictionary. So that's perhaps eighty forms to learn, but actually about forty unique forms. Keep in mind that what I call a form here is a word, associated to a case, gender and declension, so it's simpler than learning a short sentence.

Then it's practicing translation on simple examples.

From that you can build up steadily. After a year of doing it one hour a day you should be pretty tight on Latin grammar.

>>5554114

Try Lucian of Samosata.

>>5557891

I have a degree in Classics, and started Latin at 13. This material has been part of my life, and one of my primary interests, for years.

>>5557936

Just don't believe a word of it ...

(Actually, Lucian is an entertaining start on ancient literature, quite influential on earlier modern writers, and has the benefit for Anglophone readers of two recent translations, Keith Sidwell's in Penguin, ISBN 9780140447026, and CDN Costa's in Oxford World's Classics, ISBN 9780199555932 - the Penguin is the fuller selection.)

>>5557934

And if you are happy with older textbooks, you can get many free online. There's the selection at http://www.textkit.com/ for instance. Dictionary wise, there is http://athirdway.com/glossa/ (based on Lewis and Short - an Oxford dictionary published in 1879, in the public domain, and still one of the most wide ranging and reliable dictionaries, especially given that the Oxford Latin Dictionary cuts off around 200 CE). For learners wanting help with inflected forms, though, the online version of Whitaker's Words is as or more useful: http://www.archives.nd.edu/words.html

>>5556147
>comparing the language of golding to chaucer and langland
holy shit you do not know what you're talking about holy shit

Petronius.