Anna C. Pisarello provides both Latin teachers and intermediate Latin students with an invaluable resource in her recent contribution to the growing number of tiered readers for intermediate Latin students. Her tiered reader for Cicero’s Pro Archia Poeta Oratio allows the intermediate Latin student to more confidently navigate the notoriously rough waters of Cicero’s complex prose while engaging with this interesting text about immigration policy in Republican Rome, the role of poetry and literature as a means for passing on moral and ethical values, as well as the concept of one finding immortality through literary commemoration. This text allows students to grapple with a relevant defence of the humanities, particularly in our contemporary academic milieu where the practical and that which is considered to give the best return on investment are often given privileged positions over the humanities. One could easily imagine this text inspiring many fruitful classroom discussions about the purpose of education as a preparation for life, rather than merely for a career.

The text follows the now standard four-tier top-down layering approach. The fourth tier is Cicero’s original text. The third tier is slightly more approachable for the intermediate student with a text rearranged into more standard Latin word order along with the author having provided elided or implied words to aid in comprehensibility. The second tier includes syntactical rearrangement and vocabulary substitution. The first tier provides a summary of major ideas of the section with simpler grammar and vocabulary, favouring single-clause sentences and indicative mood verbs. The author provides visual markers, in the form of bold text, in the sentence to help students identify the subject and main verb in each sentence. The author also provides extensive vocabulary glosses at the beginning of each section to allow for easier comprehensibility. The author observes that some of her students have preferred the bottom-up approach to the tiers, while more confident students prefer starting at the original text and referring to the first three tiers for clarification. This tiered reader, and ones similar to it, provide a valuable resource for differentiated instruction, as well as building a bridge for students at different levels of preparedness for shifting from textbook Latin to engaging with authentic Latin literature. Personally, I plan to include this text in my Latin III course for the upcoming academic year.