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Epistulae: The Letters of Pliny Retold for Latin Learners (Lingua Latina) - Volume 1
Paperback
Foreign Language GeneralLetters & EssaysAncient Rome
Publisher: Independently Published
Published: Jul 8 2026
Pages: 290
Weight: 0.86
Height: 0.61 Width: 6.00 Depth: 9.00
Language: Latin
Rome's greatest letters... The eruption of Vesuvius... All entirely in Latin and explained in Latin.
Pliny the Younger watched Vesuvius destroy Pompeii when he was seventeen - and wrote the only eyewitness account that survives. This graded Latin reader takes you from your first Salūtem dīcit! all the way to reading that account, and twenty more of his greatest letters, complete and unabridged - with every new word explained in Latin, in the margin, the rberg way. No English translations. No dictionary. No shortcuts.
Every letter on the AP(R) Latin syllabus is here, complete: the love letters to Calpurnia (6.4, 6.7), the haunted house (7.27), both Vesuvius letters to Tacitus (6.16, 6.20), and the full Trajan correspondence - the citizenship petitions (10.5-7) and the aqueduct file (10.37-38, 10.90-91). Each AP letter is retold in easy Latin first, then given in Pliny's exact unadapted words, so students meet the tested text twice.
Twenty-two chapters in four parts:
- EPISTULA - what a Roman letter is: the boar hunt with a stylus, the chariot races he refused to watch, a seaside villa, a boy and his dolphin
- HOMINĒS - love, grief, and fear: Calpurnia, a dying girl, a sick freedman, Rome's most charming villain, and the original chained-ghost story
- VESUVIUS - the AP core, four full chapters: the pine-shaped cloud, the uncle's last voyage, the earthquakes, the darkness at noon
- TRĀIĀNUS - writing to an emperor: citizenship, aqueducts, the famous letter on the Christians, and a farewell day in the Tuscan villa
A fresh start: this volume opens its own vocabulary world from the first page - around 600 words, each glossed in Latin exactly once. No prerequisite: it stands alone, or continues the Lingua Latina series after Stratagemata and Dē Bellō Gallicō.
Richly illustrated: 22 full-page cinematic plates, an antique-style map of the Bay of Naples in 79 AD, and an engraved bird's-eye reconstruction of Pliny's Laurentine villa, labeled entirely in Latin.
Complete apparatus: the entire original text of every letter; PERSŌNAE HISTORICAE - eleven lives, from Pliny's mother to the emperor Trajan, in Latin; and a 384-entry INDEX VERBŌRUM.
Perfect for: AP Latin students and teachers, homeschool families, self-taught Latinists, and every reader of Familia Romana who wants real Roman voices - not war this time, but dinner parties, ghosts, grief, love, and one very famous volcano.
Scrīptor tam diū vīvit quam diū legitur. Sequere litterās.
AP(R) is a trademark registered by the College Board, which is not affiliated with, and does not endorse, this product.
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