Lhomond's Epitome Historiae Sacrae - LTM edition

Prefatory Note Story-Index

Elementary Readers Index

A Kindle bilingual pari passu translation is available here:

paginae: 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11

Prefatory Note and Textual Information

Since no one can really understand Western culture without some solid knowledge of the Bible, and since no one can really understand our world today without some solid knowledge of Western culture, it seems educationally valuable and even necessary to introduce all of our students to some of the vivid, long-revered narratives of the Judaeo-Christian tradition.

These stories are at least as instructive, at least as influential, and at least as important for our larger self-understanding as the Greco-Roman materials that can be found in a reader like Hillard and Botting's Elementary Latin Translation Book. They also provide an interesting source of comparison with both the mythological and the historical content found in that reader.

This Epitome, authored by the Abbé Charles François Lhomond at the end of the 18th century, has been scanned and revised almost entirely from the edition made by George Ironside (Philadelphia: Thomas, Cowperthwait, & Co., 1843). I add to the text found there some revision of punctuation, a few minor emendations where necessary, and the full marking of long vowels, which supports a habit of correct pronunciation and accentuation. Circumflex accents are used in place of macrons for better compatibility with various fonts, even though the rarely-occurring long Y cannot be indicated this way. I have kept the titles that I found in the original, with their utterly archaic chronology and their overt Christian reference, to allow for the students' insights into the development of historical and religious consciousness. And of course, there is some value in keeping the titles for those who wish to study the development of texts for Latin-learning: they can have the content a bit closer to the way in which it originally stood.

The text uses an "easy-comprehension" (or Acceleration-Reader format) to facilitate the acts of understanding that readers must learn to make. The students' easier recognition and then mastery of frequently recurring structural patterns should accelerate their acquisition of reading-fluency. I have tried to keep the average line at between two and five words. When the meanings of the individual lines can be grasped immediately, it will be helpful to practice comprehending the units in as large a context as possible and appropriate, in a process that is similar to reading down the vertical columns of text in newspapers. Reading the passages aloud with understanding is also highly recommended.

When a sound-file is available, it is marked by an icon like this: . An Italianate / late-antique / ecclesiastical pronunciation is used, reflecting what seems likely to have been the more widespread traditional usage through the many post-classical centuries into our own day.

The Epitome Historiae Sacrae consists of 209 stories and is approximately 14,000 Latin words in length. It is being made freely available here for non-commercial educational use. I am indebted to the Society of Jesus and to Saint Louis University for the support that has made this work possible.