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Scribblers, Sculptors, and Scribes: A Companion to Wheelock's Latin and Other Introductory Textbooks
A Must-Have Companion for Every Student Beginning Latin
"Scribblers, Scvlptors, and Scribes" is the first collection of entirely authentic, unadapted, unsimplified classical Latin texts that beginning students, from the very first day of their introduction to Latin, can read, enjoy, and profit from. These selections provide a wide range of insights into not just the minds of Rome's movers and shakers-her politicians and generals, philosophers and great poets-but also into the daily lives of the Average Joe and Jane Roman.
Beginning with simple graffiti, "Scribblers, Sculptors, and Scribes" moves toward longer inscriptions and literary texts as students progress. Designed to accompany the bestselling Wheelock's curriculum, its 40 chapters are linked with the 40 chapters of "Wheelock's Latin," but the book's readings and design features make it suitable for use alongside any introductory college or high school Latin textbook. Packed with hundreds of actual Latin inscriptions, proverbs, and literary texts, this unique textbook also includes dozens of photos and illustrations, maps, discussion and comprehension questions, grammar capsules, a Latin-English vocabulary section, a summary of forms, and much more.
336 pages, Paperback
First published April 20, 2010
About the author
Richard A. LaFleur
18 books10 followersRichard A. LaFleur is Franklin Professor of Classics Emeritus at the University of Georgia, where he taught from 1972 to 2012 and served for 21 years as head of one of the largest Classics and Latin programs in North America.
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Displaying 1 - 5 of 5 reviews
July 7, 2013
What a great textbook! Richard Lafleur has created a window into the daily lives of ordinary (and extraordinary)Romans by using their own words and focusing on the personal aspects of Roman life. The title takes its name from three types of Latin selections: the "scribblers" are mainly samples of ancient graffiti but also include a few of the Vindolanda tablets, the "sculptors" are selections of various tombstones and monuments, and the "scribblers" are maxims, notes, and writings of authors who are not often read in your typical Latin classes.
The selections of graffiti provide a touching snapshot of Pompeii and Herculaneum. You will find love (and hate) notes, notations of gladiator enthusiasts, political signs, bathroom humor, scribblings of school children, sampling of ancient handwriting, and even grammatical errors and misspellings.
The Vindolanda tablets, discovered in the 1970s in northern England, are thin sheets of wood used as stationary by Romans stationed at a fort near the future Hadrian's Wall. The samples that Lafleur includes are notes about oysters enjoyed by a soldier, a complaint that one writer's brother hasn't written back in a while, and an invitation from a commander's wife to her friend for a birthday celebration.
The epitaphs are often touching, recording parents' grief at the loss of a child, a wife's devotion to her husband, or a man who took an Epicurean philosophy of life. I have often found it frustrating trying to read inscriptions because of all the abbreviations (D. M. S., L., H. S. E., S. T. T. L., et alia), but Lafleur spells them out after first giving the example as it originally appeared. He often, but not always, provides photographs of the originals.
Other Latin selections are taken from slave collars, a wine bowl, bronze tablets containing stock replies from the Sibyl, and drawings.
As far as the authors you will find excerpted in this text, Lafleur heavily favors Martial, probably because he is fairly easy to translate and because his notes accompanying gifts give another view of Roman daily life. Maxims and mottoes very often come from the many one liners of Publilius Syrus' Sententiae. You will also find two poems of Sulpicia, the only Roman poetess whose poems survive, a lot of Pliny's correspondence, including a note to the emperor, a few recipes from Apicius, and one selection from Frontinus' book on Roman aqueducts.
How useful is this as a textbook? It certainly should not be a primary text for a Latin class, but it would be a great supplement, perhaps for Latin 2, certainly for Latin 3. The earlier selections are accessible to Latin 1 students, but the grammar becomes increasingly complex pretty quickly.
A real jewel of a book. I highly recommend it.
The selections of graffiti provide a touching snapshot of Pompeii and Herculaneum. You will find love (and hate) notes, notations of gladiator enthusiasts, political signs, bathroom humor, scribblings of school children, sampling of ancient handwriting, and even grammatical errors and misspellings.
The Vindolanda tablets, discovered in the 1970s in northern England, are thin sheets of wood used as stationary by Romans stationed at a fort near the future Hadrian's Wall. The samples that Lafleur includes are notes about oysters enjoyed by a soldier, a complaint that one writer's brother hasn't written back in a while, and an invitation from a commander's wife to her friend for a birthday celebration.
The epitaphs are often touching, recording parents' grief at the loss of a child, a wife's devotion to her husband, or a man who took an Epicurean philosophy of life. I have often found it frustrating trying to read inscriptions because of all the abbreviations (D. M. S., L., H. S. E., S. T. T. L., et alia), but Lafleur spells them out after first giving the example as it originally appeared. He often, but not always, provides photographs of the originals.
Other Latin selections are taken from slave collars, a wine bowl, bronze tablets containing stock replies from the Sibyl, and drawings.
As far as the authors you will find excerpted in this text, Lafleur heavily favors Martial, probably because he is fairly easy to translate and because his notes accompanying gifts give another view of Roman daily life. Maxims and mottoes very often come from the many one liners of Publilius Syrus' Sententiae. You will also find two poems of Sulpicia, the only Roman poetess whose poems survive, a lot of Pliny's correspondence, including a note to the emperor, a few recipes from Apicius, and one selection from Frontinus' book on Roman aqueducts.
How useful is this as a textbook? It certainly should not be a primary text for a Latin class, but it would be a great supplement, perhaps for Latin 2, certainly for Latin 3. The earlier selections are accessible to Latin 1 students, but the grammar becomes increasingly complex pretty quickly.
A real jewel of a book. I highly recommend it.
July 13, 2013
This is an excellent supplemental resource for introductory Latin courses. Using the grammatical framework of Wheelock's famous textbook, it provides level-appropriate selections from authentic Latin inscriptions, poems, and prose to help students develop their vocabulary and translation skills. It is entirely student-friendly: the longer passages are fully annotated with running vocabulary lists, and it includes an appendix of all grammatical forms. I especially enjoy the book's focus on graffiti and funerary inscriptions, as it helps students gain a more balanced view of the complexity of Roman society.
October 2, 2014
I used this text as part of a Latin self-study tutorial with the author himself helping me out. So I know firsthand that he is a very kind man who cares deeply for his students -- I am not writing this review, in other words, to be negative about him.
For more background information: I have finished the first twenty-five chapters of Wheelock's Latin with the aim in mind to be able to read a few authors in the original. I am specifically targeting the epic poets like Ovid and Vergil and some prose writers like Augustine, Petronius, Caesar, and Apulieus. I would also like to be able to read Catullus and some of the minor poets in the original Latin. Later, I am sure other authors I have not mentioned will also interest me as I discover more about Latin literature. Anyhow..
The reason why I only give this three stars is for two main reasons -- one, do not buy the e-book version of the book. It is a pain to navigate and has irritating formatting in places. Constantly having to switch three or four pages forward to see vocabulary annotations is quite frustrating and the text is too small to be read comfortably (though this can be fixed on an e-reader by adjusting text size).
The bigger reason however is simply that it feels too much like a workbook. The biggest strength, honestly, is the inclusion of epitaphs and graffito that help show aspects of Roman culture at the time. The downside is that most of the proverbs you have to translate, along with many of the "literature" sections featuring Martial, Pliny, and etc. are heavily adapted and make for poor pedagogical tools. The reason I say this is that, while this is a fine textbook in some respects, it never moves beyond grammatical translation at largely sentence level Latin (except for a few adapted pieces of prose and the like). 40 chapters of such material using only these proverbs/quips ripped out of context and these adapted passages, therefore, don't do anything to help improve your reading comprehension past the sentence. At best, you get passages that have three of four small paragraphs of text. This brevity and sentence-level focus certainly matches Wheelock's approach and provides entertaining material for a Latin teacher to use in class, but I think the transition to reading a real Latin text is going to be more difficult than necessary when the time comes to move past adapted texts, simplified sentence translation, and nicely formulated sentences illustrating targetted grammar forms.
(Those studying in Latin programs, of course, will have the added support and benefit of later Latin classes with harder material and expert assistance; in my case, I study by myself and have to rely on the instructional texts rather heavily in comparison to those who are studying Latin formally.)
The other problem is that, while the macrons help with pronunciation issues, they don't help the prospective readers of Latin texts who have to deal with macron-free original texts later in their studies.
I see why the author took his approach to the text -- after all, Latin is a hard sell in this day and age when many would rather learn a more "practical" modern language and, for English speakers or other languages that rely quite heavily on word order, the inflections and difficult morphology can be frustrating to learn at first. However, for someone like me, that is someone who is serious about reading Latin for the rest of his life and who doesn't need the kid gloves treatment, it would have been nice to have had fewer chapters and more focus on a few, longer and significantly less adapted pieces of prose to work with in preparation for Caesar or another "intermediate" Latin author.
As a result, I have decided to stop using this text as of Chapter 25 and will simply try to work through Wheelock's as soon as I can -- I just accept the fact that I will have to struggle a bit at first with the real stuff later. If you are looking for easy Latin either in adapted form, there is a fine, freely available version of "Ritchie's Easy Stories" that includes vocabulary glosses and grammar help for 100 entertaining little stories. It can be used reliably after doing the first half of Wheelock's. If you want easy original Latin, there is always the Vulgate (for which there is an abundance of translations and vocabulary help online..). I also think it's easy to tackle even with quite a few chapters left in Wheelock's to finish..
(Or if the Bible isn't your book, something I can understand, seek out the Orberg textbook "Lingua Latina").
For more background information: I have finished the first twenty-five chapters of Wheelock's Latin with the aim in mind to be able to read a few authors in the original. I am specifically targeting the epic poets like Ovid and Vergil and some prose writers like Augustine, Petronius, Caesar, and Apulieus. I would also like to be able to read Catullus and some of the minor poets in the original Latin. Later, I am sure other authors I have not mentioned will also interest me as I discover more about Latin literature. Anyhow..
The reason why I only give this three stars is for two main reasons -- one, do not buy the e-book version of the book. It is a pain to navigate and has irritating formatting in places. Constantly having to switch three or four pages forward to see vocabulary annotations is quite frustrating and the text is too small to be read comfortably (though this can be fixed on an e-reader by adjusting text size).
The bigger reason however is simply that it feels too much like a workbook. The biggest strength, honestly, is the inclusion of epitaphs and graffito that help show aspects of Roman culture at the time. The downside is that most of the proverbs you have to translate, along with many of the "literature" sections featuring Martial, Pliny, and etc. are heavily adapted and make for poor pedagogical tools. The reason I say this is that, while this is a fine textbook in some respects, it never moves beyond grammatical translation at largely sentence level Latin (except for a few adapted pieces of prose and the like). 40 chapters of such material using only these proverbs/quips ripped out of context and these adapted passages, therefore, don't do anything to help improve your reading comprehension past the sentence. At best, you get passages that have three of four small paragraphs of text. This brevity and sentence-level focus certainly matches Wheelock's approach and provides entertaining material for a Latin teacher to use in class, but I think the transition to reading a real Latin text is going to be more difficult than necessary when the time comes to move past adapted texts, simplified sentence translation, and nicely formulated sentences illustrating targetted grammar forms.
(Those studying in Latin programs, of course, will have the added support and benefit of later Latin classes with harder material and expert assistance; in my case, I study by myself and have to rely on the instructional texts rather heavily in comparison to those who are studying Latin formally.)
The other problem is that, while the macrons help with pronunciation issues, they don't help the prospective readers of Latin texts who have to deal with macron-free original texts later in their studies.
I see why the author took his approach to the text -- after all, Latin is a hard sell in this day and age when many would rather learn a more "practical" modern language and, for English speakers or other languages that rely quite heavily on word order, the inflections and difficult morphology can be frustrating to learn at first. However, for someone like me, that is someone who is serious about reading Latin for the rest of his life and who doesn't need the kid gloves treatment, it would have been nice to have had fewer chapters and more focus on a few, longer and significantly less adapted pieces of prose to work with in preparation for Caesar or another "intermediate" Latin author.
As a result, I have decided to stop using this text as of Chapter 25 and will simply try to work through Wheelock's as soon as I can -- I just accept the fact that I will have to struggle a bit at first with the real stuff later. If you are looking for easy Latin either in adapted form, there is a fine, freely available version of "Ritchie's Easy Stories" that includes vocabulary glosses and grammar help for 100 entertaining little stories. It can be used reliably after doing the first half of Wheelock's. If you want easy original Latin, there is always the Vulgate (for which there is an abundance of translations and vocabulary help online..). I also think it's easy to tackle even with quite a few chapters left in Wheelock's to finish..
(Or if the Bible isn't your book, something I can understand, seek out the Orberg textbook "Lingua Latina").
August 1, 2019
I'm super into this!
As a Cambridge Latin student in my youth, I developed a healthy scepticism of Wheelock's. But in recent years I have come to appreciate its approach to teaching the language in a first-year course. This volume is a healthy supplement, keyed to each of the chapters in that volume, and with the same learned but goofy tone. Here, however, the focus is on brief excerpts, inscriptions, and graffiti.
What I enjoy about this is its well-researched flair, the range of emotions and jokes from all of this authentic Latin material, and the way this introduces more cultural elements to a course than perhaps the main body of Wheelock's allows. And, rather than stopping there, it includes a healthy dose of commentary and elaboration to make this a rewarding book in its own right.
Perhaps for students taking Latin at the end of highschool or in first-year university, this could be a textbook associated with the course. However my recommendation is for the teacher to use this as a source of information - alongside the answer key one can obtain from the publisher - for in-class lessons and homework. It can be a benefit for the teacher to provide "fun" things the students haven't previously seen, and allow them to cherrypick rather than take the whole volume. The style allows for this very easily.
A satisfying addition to my Latin collection.
As a Cambridge Latin student in my youth, I developed a healthy scepticism of Wheelock's. But in recent years I have come to appreciate its approach to teaching the language in a first-year course. This volume is a healthy supplement, keyed to each of the chapters in that volume, and with the same learned but goofy tone. Here, however, the focus is on brief excerpts, inscriptions, and graffiti.
What I enjoy about this is its well-researched flair, the range of emotions and jokes from all of this authentic Latin material, and the way this introduces more cultural elements to a course than perhaps the main body of Wheelock's allows. And, rather than stopping there, it includes a healthy dose of commentary and elaboration to make this a rewarding book in its own right.
Perhaps for students taking Latin at the end of highschool or in first-year university, this could be a textbook associated with the course. However my recommendation is for the teacher to use this as a source of information - alongside the answer key one can obtain from the publisher - for in-class lessons and homework. It can be a benefit for the teacher to provide "fun" things the students haven't previously seen, and allow them to cherrypick rather than take the whole volume. The style allows for this very easily.
A satisfying addition to my Latin collection.
May 1, 2026
What a learning, enjoyable book this is! Great way to continue Latin. Now on to.G Steadman.
Displaying 1 - 5 of 5 reviews