Start with a story at your level
Latin stories for beginners.
Cornelia
A simple, controlled world of family and daily life built through repetition.
Perseus
Birth, Medusa, Andromeda, and heroic adventure in simplified Classical Latin.
Roman Stories
Nine short stories, dialogues, and poems for early extensive reading.
Moral Anecdotes and Fables
Thirteen compact tales of greed, foolishness, deceit, and cleverness.
Mythological Tales
Twenty short myths: gods, mortals, punishment, invention, contests, and transformation.
Ulixis Errores
Ulysses recounts seven episodes from his long wandering after Troy.
More on these story books: Fabulae Faciles (Perseus), Fabulae Virginibus Puerisque (the myths and fables), Decem Fabulae (ten short plays), Cornelia, and P. Cornelius Lentulus.
When you want an authentic story
Authentic Latin stories, not written for learners.
Historia Apollonii Regis Tyri
A young king crosses the Mediterranean through danger, love, separation, and reunion.
Menaechmi
Two identical twins create a city-wide chain of mistaken identities.
De Excidio Troiae Historia
A compact Latin retelling of the Trojan War from causes to destruction.
Itinerarium Egeriae
A late-antique traveler records pilgrimage, places, worship, and movement across the eastern Mediterranean.
Breviarium: Liber I
Rome’s kings and early Republic in compact historical prose.
Naufragium
A disastrous sea voyage told through Erasmus’s lively conversational Latin.
Why stories are efficient reading practice
Why Latin stories are efficient reading practice.
Stories reduce one source of uncertainty: you can often predict the kind of thing that could happen next. This is not a reason to guess recklessly — it is a reason to use context as real linguistic information.
If you know those three things, you often understand the narrative even with gaps.
Look up a recurring unknown; ignore a one-off detail if the story still works.
Endings tell you who acted on whom.
Once you know what happened, the Latin often becomes much more transparent.