Who I am
I am a Latin (and occasionally Greek) teacher with two decades of experience that I have used to write commentaries of Latin texts with notes and vocab for students.
Why this site
Mainly, I created this site to house the various commentaries on Latin texts that I’ve created so far over my teaching career. I am a huge believer that students can, with appropriate supports, read authentic Latin literature (both from the Roman era and later) while at the intermediate level, after a couple years of high school or college instruction. These texts are all ones I have used successfully with students in their third or fourth year of high school Latin.
These commentaries, then, with facing vocab and notes and sometimes exercises, were mainly written so that I could teach texts I wanted to, but which did not have existing, modern student editions. They include some frequently taught authors (Ovid, Catullus) but in lesser-studied works (the stories of Arachne and Attis), as well as authors who are not generally taught at the intermediate level, especially in high school (Suetonius, Aeneas Silvius Piccolomini), or who have fallen out of favor (Phaedrus).
I have also included some materials I’ve made to teach with over the years that I hope others will find helpful!
On macrons (long marks)
I believe strongly that all Latin texts, at least from the Roman era, should be edited to include macrons. The argument is sometimes made that they are ‘inauthentic’ (“The Romans didn’t use them”) which is both not true (the Romans did indeed at times mark vowel quantity, in inscriptions particularly) and not relevant (we add all sorts of orthographic features to our presentation of Latin today that the Romans didn’t use (spaces, punctuation, u/v and i/j in some cases). Without macrons, pronunciation suffers – we should absolutely be distinguishing long and short vowels when we read and speak Latin aloud if we use any type of restored Classical pronunciation. Therefore, all texts I produce generally do contain macrons.