This page is maintained by the Oberlin College Classics Department.It houses two commentary projects: a student commentary to Horace’s Epistles I, and a scholarly commentary to Seneca’s Naturales Quaestiones Book 3 (see the NQ introduction for acknowledgements).
In the Spring of 2019, Prof. Christopher Trinacty taught a course on Horace’s Epistles with the goal of producing commentaries for intermediate Latin students. These commentaries were written by Prof. Trinacty, Neil McCalmont, and Thomas Valle-Hoag (with editing help provided by Hannah Long). Prof. Trinacty continued to work on these commentaries with the help of students in the Fall of 2020. The student researchers were Colin Regan, Emma Glen, Emily Hudson, Zihua Ren, Elliott Ronna, and Charlotte Glessner-Fischer. In the Fall of 2021, students in a Horace class were tasked with producing the commentary to Epistle 2.1. Those students were Emily Hudson, Kayla Elias, Yang Han, Sam Tar, Raphael Thomas, and Elliot Diaz. We hope you enjoy them (and feel free to get in touch with us about comments, questions, or corrections). This wouldn’t be possible without the programming help of Bret Mulligan at Haverford College and Aidan Kidder-Wolff.
We relied heavily on previous commentaries such as those by Cucchiarelli 2019, Mayer 1994, Wickam 1903, and Greenough 1887. For Epistle 2.1, the commentaries of Brink 1982 and Rudd 1989 were invaluable. The text is Klingner 1959 (accessed through the Packard Humanities Institute).
In the commentaries OLD refers to the Oxford Latin Dictionary and A&G refers to Allen and Greenough’s New Latin Grammar.