The selections which were chosen for this Livy reader are fun to read and rewarding to translate, including such well-known events as Horatius on the bridge into Rome and Hannibal crossing the Alps. It is nice to have these episodes in front of you without having to leaf through the volumes and volumes of Livy's work that survive today. The only selections I could have done without are the ones with Livy not really talking about any historical event in particular, like the opening or his preface to the Punic Wars, but these selections offered more of a challenge to translate since they were less straightforward.
However, this book is more of a pain in the ass than it ought to be for a Latin student. Mary Jaeger's notes, while occasionally nice in that they will point out a rhetorical device you may not have noticed or that they give present day names for the settings, are entirely unhelpful and at times even misleading for the translator. There were many times working through this book that I said to myself, "a note on this would have been handy" and even points where I found that my translation would run smoother if I did not take Ms Jaeger's "advice". Also her definition of what an "ablative absolute" is seems to differ from what I remember learning from Wheelock, becoming so broad that it encompasses most usages of the ablative. So, yeah, the notes kind of suck. To make matters worse, whereas in most Latin readers either the notes or the glossary is on the same page as the text or on the page facing it, or, if you are lucky, you get both, in this book the notes and glossary are both in the back of the book, forcing you to read the Latin, flip to the notes, flip again to the glossary, and flip back to the Latin, making the work of translation unnecessarily tedious. Furthermore, the glossary seems to take up a large portion of the book, including every word you will come across in the text, whereas most readers like this only include what it doesn't expect you to know; while this would be good for a new student, it is insulting and annoying to an advanced student to see stuff like "ut" or "do, dare" in there, and frankly, if Mary Jaeger expects her readers to be good enough with their Latin to not require helpful notes, then why would she include such an extensive glossary? The mind boggles. Lastly, it is pretty short. There are only 24 pages of Livy in here.
So, teachers who are considering using this book: I wouldn't recommend it for any but advanced Latin students, and keep in mind that it is too short to take up a whole semester with. Students who have been assigned this book: study up on indirect statement and be able to recognize superlatives, comparatives, and future participles, because Livy like to use them. Good luck.
