This book will teach you some practical things, like how to get a herd of reluctant elephants to swim across a deep river (Anecdote 75). It will also give you something profound to think about, like whether the divine world is aware of everything that you do (Anecdote 1). But it will above all help you to learn Latin in an interesting and memorable way. There are seventy-five interesting anecdotes for beginning and intermediate Latin students, with English translations to guide those who need them. Though extrememly brief, these little stories highlight essential Latin vocabulary, phrasing, structure, and grammar, even while they introduce the readers to some memorable bits of the world’s classical Greco-Roman heritage. When particular grammatical forms and topics have not yet been taken up in class (as with the indirect question and subjunctive in the first anecdote, for example), familiarization with this material will constitute excellent preparation and grounding for what will be understood more fully later on. It is worth keeping in mind that explicit knowledge of grammar is not a prerequisite for the accurate and speedy understanding of a language: in our own lives we all engaged in meaningful communications long before we attained any mastery (or even awareness) of technical grammatical terminology. This book can be used not only as a narrative means of raising and remembering grammatical features and usages but also as a way of promoting the practice of comprehension.
