Latin prose composition: Books and Method

Have you ever come across some­thing called “Latin prose com­po­si­tion” and won­dered what it was, if it was use­ful, how to do it and where to begin?

Latin prose com­po­si­tion hap­pens to be one of my favorite Latin learn­ing and teach­ing tech­niques that I’ve used often myself and have my stu­dents use it.

Latin prose com­po­si­tion is not actu­al com­po­si­tion but an exer­cise in trans­lat­ing from a mod­ern lan­guage into Latin. It is a didac­tic exer­cise with the focus of drilling vocab­u­lary and gram­mar. Latin prose com­po­si­tion books, such as North and Hillard, and Bradley’s Arnold, seek to con­sol­i­date the stu­dents’ knowl­edge of Latin syn­tax and lex­i­con while also prepar­ing them to use Latin active­ly and dras­ti­cal­ly improve their read­ing comprehension. 

In this arti­cle, I’ll go through a few ques­tions regard­ing Latin prose com­po­si­tion that I’ve got­ten through­out my years of teach­ing Latin. I’ll also rec­om­mend which prose com­po­si­tion books to use, how to use them and how not to use them.

What is Latin prose composition?

Latin prose com­po­si­tion per­haps sounds a bit odd. “Com­po­si­tion” imme­di­ate­ly brings to mind music com­po­si­tion, which is free and cre­ative. Latin com­po­si­tion, how­ev­er, is every­thing but free and cre­ative. “Com­po­si­tion” here is rather a euphemism for old-fash­ioned struc­tured trans­la­tion exer­cis­es to drill vocab­u­lary and gram­mar where you trans­late from a mod­ern lan­guage into Latin. But it is a tried and true—and from my expe­ri­ence as a Latin teacher—fantastic lan­guage learn­ing technique.

Latin prose com­po­si­tion guides you to start using Latin active­ly, even if it does so in a tra­di­tion­al, quite square way. It also con­sol­i­dates and improves your vocab­u­lary and gram­mar. It is (nor­mal­ly) a stan­dard part of Uni­ver­si­ty class­es in Latin—one of the few remain­ing exer­cis­es at Uni­ver­si­ties where you actu­al­ly use Latin actively. 

Is Latin prose composition useful?

Latin prose com­po­si­tion has three main utilities: 

1. Drill gram­mar, vocab­u­lary, and com­mon idioms and expressions
2. Force you out of your com­fort zone
3. Start using Latin active­ly, in a guid­ed manner. 

First­ly, the well-struc­tured and repet­i­tive nature of Latin Prose com­po­si­tion books allows you to acquire a deep and nuanced under­stand­ing of Latin gram­mar and lex­i­con. Note that the main goal of these books is usu­al­ly to have the read­er inter­nal­ize the phrase­ol­o­gy and syn­tax of Cae­sar and Cicero, thus prepar­ing for their sub­se­quent reading. 

This means you will learn a lot from their spe­cif­ic use of vocab­u­lary and idioms – there is a lot of troop move­ments, mil­i­tary camps, charg­ing, and accus­ing peo­ple. This might not sound too inter­est­ing, but it is advan­ta­geous when you read Roman authors. 

Sec­ond­ly, if you have a good Latin com­po­si­tion book (see below) or attend a good Latin com­po­si­tion class, you will be forced to prac­tice things you did­n’t even know you could prac­tice or need­ed to practice.

In this man­ner, Latin prose com­po­si­tion is dis­tinct from free form writ­ing, wher you express your thoughts, and run the risk of stay­ing with­in your lan­guage com­fort zone.

You will thus be forced to move beyond the gram­mar and lan­guage you already know; if you have to trans­late a par­tic­u­lar sen­tence, you can­not avoid it or use cir­cum­lo­cu­tions. You have to find a way to express the book’s sen­tence in Latin. This way, you will get a thor­ough run-through of Latin syn­tax, extend your vocab­u­lary knowl­edge, and learn many great expres­sions along the way.

Last­ly, Latin prose com­po­si­tion is fun­da­men­tal if you want to write or speak Latin well. The exer­cis­es prac­tice your active use of Latin, mean­ing you need to find the words your­self in your own head, for­mu­late a sen­tence and make it cor­rect. Start­ing to write Latin in this way builds the con­fi­dence need­ed to progress and speak Latin.

Which Latin prose composition book should I use? 

A good Latin prose com­po­si­tion book will feel and func­tion a lit­tle bit like a check­list: you can tick off one thing after anoth­er. First, you might prac­tice the accusative with the infini­tive, then the abla­tive of com­par­i­son, next indi­rect ques­tions, and so forth. 

This gives a sat­is­fy­ing sense of “fin­ish­ing” things, mak­ing it easy to track your own progress. Grant­ed, hav­ing done a few exer­cis­es on a par­tic­u­lar aspect does not mean that you have inter­nal­ized it, but it is a great first step. Review and read­ing will get you there. 

There are sev­er­al good Latin prose com­po­si­tion books out there. How­ev­er, I do have two favorites that are great to use, one after the other. 

The first one is North & Hillard’s Latin Prose Com­po­si­tion, which is aimed at stu­dents who are start­ing to write Latin – but keep in mind that you still need to know basic Latin when you begin as it is not writ­ten for com­plete beginners.

Once you’ve fin­ished North & Hillard, the sec­ond book I rec­om­mend is Bradley’s Arnold Latin Prose Com­po­si­tion. This is the stan­dard book for advanced prose com­po­si­tion and a very good one at that. 

Note, if you feel that the con­tent of these books is bor­ing, you are like­ly cor­rect. It is quite bor­ing, but the exer­cise as a whole is fun.

How are Latin prose composition books constructed?

Usu­al­ly, Latin prose com­po­si­tion books are divid­ed into chap­ters with dif­fer­ent top­ics, each focus­ing on one aspect of gram­mar or syn­tax. Both my favorites, North & Hillard and Bradley’s Arnold, are con­struct­ed in this way.

Every chap­ter begins with an expla­na­tion of the focus of the chap­ter, fol­lowed by a few more or less illu­mi­nat­ing exam­ple sen­tences in Latin. Last­ly, you find the actu­al exer­cise: Eng­lish (or anoth­er mod­ern lan­guage) sen­tences to be trans­lat­ed into Latin. 

How to use a Latin prose composition book

To use a Latin prose com­po­si­tion book is fair­ly straight­for­ward: Read the expla­na­tions and exam­ples found in each chap­ter thor­ough­ly. Then reread them. Make sure you under­stand them, and if you don’t, con­sult a gram­mar or two on the subject.

Next, read the sen­tence to be trans­lat­ed care­ful­ly. Note that the Eng­lish in these books might be a lit­tle bit dusty and old-fash­ioned, and the mean­ings of cer­tain words may be dif­fer­ent today due to seman­tic change over the last hun­dred years.

Next, trans­late into Latin.

Remem­ber, almost every Eng­lish sen­tence is writ­ten so that it has to be trans­lat­ed with the gram­mar or syn­tax that that spe­cif­ic chap­ter teach­es. If you, for instance, are trans­lat­ing sen­tences from the chap­ter on the gen­i­tive of price, the chances are that the sen­tence will want you to use the gen­i­tive of price in your translation. 

After you have fin­ished a chap­ter, check the answer key (avail­able online) and see what you did well and what you need to review. Remem­ber, how­ev­er, that there are usu­al­ly many ways you could trans­late a par­tic­u­lar sen­tence. Still, if you read the chap­ter exam­ples and use the book’s glos­sary, you will most like­ly come close to the answer in the key.

What not to do in Latin prose composition exercises

First of all, if you don’t know a word or an expres­sion when trans­lat­ing into Latin, don’t look it up in a dic­tio­nary as would oth­er­wise be rec­om­mend­ed. Dic­tio­nar­ies will give you too much infor­ma­tion, and chances are you might find the entire sen­tence that you’re try­ing to trans­late as an exam­ple in the dic­tio­nary. Remem­ber that the books are prepar­ing you for Cicero and Cae­sar, which means at times they use Eng­lish trans­la­tions of their texts, so you might actu­al­ly find the “right” answer in a dic­tio­nary. Instead, use the list of vocab­u­lary that you will find in the back of your prose com­po­si­tion book. That list will give you every­thing you need, no more no less. 

Don’t rush. Do every com­po­si­tion exer­cise care­ful­ly and dili­gent­ly. Don’t use a com­put­er, instead, write by hand. This gives your brain extra time to process what you are doing and research has shown that “the addi­tion­al con­text pro­vid­ed by the com­plex task of writ­ing results in bet­ter mem­o­ry” (Smok­er, Mur­phy, Rock­well, 2009, “Com­par­ing mem­o­ry for hand­writ­ing ver­sus typ­ing.” In Pro­ceed­ings of the Human Fac­tors and Ergonom­ics Soci­ety Annu­al Meet­ing).

Final tips for Latin prose composition

Prac­tice Latin prose com­po­si­tion every day: a chap­ter a day for a year will do won­ders for your Latin, even if it might not feel like it now. In addi­tion, when you feel the exer­cis­es are becom­ing too easy, try doing the oral­ly, read­ing the eng­lish and trans­lat­ing instant­ly into Latin. 

When you read Latin and encounter a con­struc­tion or gram­mat­i­cal aspect that you’ve prac­ticed in your prose com­po­si­tion book, stop for a while. Let it soak in that you have actu­al­ly writ­ten sim­i­lar sen­tences, which means that you are on your way to writ­ing a Latin in the same style that the Romans did 2000 years ago. Take pride in that!

Final­ly, remem­ber that Latin prose com­po­si­tion is guid­ed trans­la­tion drills and are only a small part of what you need to learn to read Latin lit­er­a­ture: the most impor­tant thing to do is to read as much as possible.