Fabulae Romanae
Shakespeare’s plots are retold as one connected Roman world: shipwrecked twins in Illyria, merchants sailing from Venice, lovers lost outside Athens, and soldiers posted to Cyprus. No sentence is translated from a modern course. The Latin begins with what a place is, repeats before it advances, and grows toward sustained narration; tap a word whenever you want the dictionary rather than a guess from context.
This is an expanding first-year reader: 11 of 35 planned chapters are published, with 5,290 words of original narrative and 464 introduced lexemes. Its length and grammatical runway are being paced against Lingua Latina per se illustrata: Familia Romana; none of that book’s sentences are copied, translated or paraphrased.
- IIllyricumA Roman world, an Illyrian coast and separated twins, with one verb.
36 new words · 2 names
- IIVilla et hortusA garden, a table and a letter, and a verb that takes an object.
56 new words · 6 names
- IIINomen puellaeWhose? The genitive, the enclitic -que, and the first questions.
40 new words · 6 names
- IVVenetiaShips, merchants and money: giving, and the case you give to.
44 new words · 4 names
- VProcellaOut of, with, without: the ablative, and verbs in -eo.
45 new words · 4 names
- VIAthenaeA city, four lovers and a wood: the plural of every case.
46 new words · 4 names
- VIINoxA wood after dark, and the declension that hides its stem.
42 new words · 7 names
- VIIICyprusA garrison, a trick and a handkerchief: verbs in -it, and orders.
42 new words · 5 names
- IXFortiorBraver than, sadder than: third-declension adjectives, and -ior.
42 new words · 10 names
- XConviviumEveryone in one room: this one, that one, and the one who.
38 new words · 18 names
- XIGemini EphesiTwo masters, two servants, and the infinitive that sets them all in motion.
33 new words · 6 names
The full arc
People and places
The five common cases, present-tense statements and commands
Twelfth Night, The Merchant of Venice, A Midsummer Night’s Dream, Othello
A Roman day
Infinitives, all verb persons, participles, passive and deponent verbs
The Comedy of Errors, Much Ado About Nothing, The Tempest
Stories in time
Imperfect, future, perfect and pluperfect; indirect statement
Romeo and Juliet, Julius Caesar, Macbeth
Purpose and consequence
The subjunctive sequence, purpose, result, fear and indirect question
King Lear, The Winter’s Tale, Cymbeline
Rome and the stage
Extended connected prose, Roman institutions, verse and synthesis
Coriolanus, Antony and Cleopatra, The Tempest
11 chapters published, 24 planned; 464 introduced lexemes in 5,290 words of narrative.
A macron marks a long vowel: īnsula, videō. Every mark in the course is attested, and an unmarked vowel is usually short, though not always: the quantities come from a dictionary that marked a vowel only where the metre left it open, so a few long ones go bare. 237 of the course’s 492 words carry a macron, and nothing at all is recorded for 26, which are the invented names and three place names that dictionary files under a different headword.
Every word of every chapter is run through the analyser on each build and has to be one the course has already taught.