Dē Temporibus et Cāsibus Rōmae

A Latin reader in the manner of Ørberg’s Lingua Latina Per Sē Illustrāta: the language is learned by reading continuous, graded narrative rather than by memorising paradigms. In place of Ørberg’s fictional household, the narrative is Roman history itself, from the founding of the city in 753 BC to the fall of the Western Empire in 476.

Grammatical difficulty rises with the period, and the two are made to mirror the way Latin prose actually developed. The kings and the early Republic are told in plain declarative sentences — the sources for those centuries are themselves thin and legendary, so simplicity there is honest rather than merely convenient. The ablative absolute and indirect statement arrive with the Punic Wars, in something close to Caesar’s own manner. The Empire brings the longer periodic sentence of Livy. The third-century crisis and the fall are compressed and ironic, in the direction of Tacitus and, at the end, Ammianus. A reader who reaches the final chapter has for some time been reading in the style of the historians they will graduate to next.

New vocabulary and new constructions are glossed on the line directly beneath the Latin, and only there: a word is glossed for its first few appearances and then left bare, so that what has been learned must be recalled rather than read off an English crib.

Ten chapters and a glossary, set in Typst. One source produces both editions — the Latin is identical, and only the glosses change.