Pro Archia Poeta Oratio: A Tiered Latin Reader published!

Pixelia is excited to announce the release of a new and highly innovative edition of Cicero’s Pro Archia Poeta Oratio, edited by Anna Pisarello!

Cicero’s speech defending the poet Archias from the charge of falsely claiming Roman citizenship is, in many ways, ideal for the intermediate Latin classroom. It has the potential to provide students with a lively introduction to Roman forensic practices and Ciceronian rhetoric, as well as Roman debates over the role of poetry. The difficulty of the language, though, has tended to exclude the speech from all but the most advanced Latin courses.

Pisarello’s reader makes this speech accessible to a much wider range of Latin students by presenting the text in a tiered format: each section of the original Latin is accompanied by three different simplified versions of progressive difficulty. This new method of textual presentation supports intermediate Latin readers by encouraging comprehension of each successive version as they build towards full engagement with the authentic, unadapted Latin text. 

"[T]his text provides a gentle introduction to Latin prose and allows hesitant students to build their Latin reading skills at their own pace. [...] Pisarello’s tiered approach makes this reader a genuinely useful resource for teachers of Comprehensible Input-based classes, classrooms with students of varying levels of Latin proficiency, or for independent learners seeking to progressively build reading fluency."

Cassandra Ball, The Classical Journal