Help with lit selections for 1 month of Ancient Rome

[Kristin in Hawaii]

Greetings!

 

I would appreciate any suggestions. I am working with 6 great high-school home-schooled kids (including one of my own ;) and have the month of December to study ancient Rome. We are all set with Spielvogel's Western Civ. and lots of art history ***stuff*** and wanted to ask them to read from Livy, Plutarch, Cicero and Caesar. We also plan to read some Old and New Testament books. These kids just finished Fagle's translations of the Illiad and the Odyssey so they're pretty game -- but -- I'm simply overwhelmed and out of time ;P

 

Please, anybody who has walked this path before, please help me whittle down to a nice manageable selections of excerpts?

 

I'll check back later. Thanks in advance!

:blink:

What kind of time commitment are we talking about here? An hour a day? One a week? If I were short on time, I don't know that I'd read Caesar in translation. His primary value is that he writes in very clear Latin, and is fun to translate. Plutarch is a very good choice, as so much English literature, especially Shakespeare is derived from his works. Sadly, there's no good English translation of Plutarch. Which translation are you going to use? Finally, I might add some Seneca, he is a lot of fun to read, and eminently quotable.

[Kristin in Hawaii]

Hello again,

 

Thanks for the followup.

 

The kids will be expected to read this material about 1 hour daily, in addition to another 1-2 hours of work for this class. As far as versions I have ended up just going with the Penguin versions most of the times.

 

Thanks so much!