About

A few other things…

Contact me: (my name, just as it appears in the url) @gmail.com

To purchasers at bookstores:  All distribution has been limited to Amazon stores. Teachers who wish to use these commentaries in class may purchase the books from Amazon or ask their students to purchase the paperbacks themselves and use the free PDF files until their books arrive.

Purpose: I write intermediate Greek and Latin commentaries for three reasons: the first reason is that I enjoy it; the other two reasons are that, having begun the Classical Languages late in life, I believe we ought to read more material better. There is much clamor at the moment in the world of Classics about ‘language acquisition’ and getting a ‘feeling for the language’ (Sprachgefühl): the use of intuition in reading is, I believe, important, and for that reason I spend many hours making Running Vocabularlies and Facing Vocabularies for each page, to make reading as pleasurable, simple, and quick as possible. However, I do not believe that raw experience left unordered will produce sound knowledge or competency. The converse is, I believe, also true. Rote memorization of abstractions apart from concrete examples in Latin or Greek texts can be even worse than the purely intuitive approach. Taking the best from each approach leaves us reading Latin or Greek all the time–sometimes quickly, sometimes slowly–and reminding ourselves along the way of the handy generalizations found in textbooks and grammars. Rules have the power of greatly extending our limited experience if we will let them.

Self-Publishing: I have the one great aim of being useful. If I can allow thousands (as opposed to dozens) access my work with a click from all over the world the disadvantages of self-publishing seem overcome. Scholarly care is not, however, thrown aside. As the Biography below evidences, I take the disciplina of Classics very seriously and try to hold the work I make available for free to the same standard as the work I do professionally.

A Short Biography: I received my B.A. in Latin at Hillsdale College, my M.A. in Greek, Latin and Classical Studies at Bryn Mawr College, and am now a PhD Fellow in Early Church History at the University of Tübingen in Germany. I am writing a philological and historical commentary on books XIII-XIV of Eusebius’s Praeparatio Evangelica, in which are treated the relationship of Plato–and subsequent Platonism–to the Christian and Jewish traditions. My interests range widely, but in method and approach I remain indebted to my Classics training and education: in all my work I strive for that philological rigor and attention to detail that distinguishes Classics as a discipline.

I am happily married to my best friend, without whom I could achieve few of the things I aspire to. We currently have one son, Edmund, and enjoy walking in the foothills of the Swabian Alb and catching glimpses of Hohenzollern through the trees.