Lupus Alatus is a place where we want to publish novellas, readers, and other materials for learning and enjoying Latin. The name itself, “winged wolf,” is an allusion to a Latin saying found in Erasmus’s collection of adagia: Lupi alas quaeris! Translated into English, “You’re looking for wolf’s wings!” The idea being that wolf’s wings don’t exist, so you’re looking for something that you’ll never find. There was a time not too long ago where looking for certain types of Latin resources: modern readers or novellae, podcasts, Youtube videos, blogs, etc. was nearly as fruitless as searching for wolf’s wings. However, the last decade has seen a proliferation of Latin content made readily available on the internet. This has been a boon for all of us who want to learn, enjoy, or teach Latin. And while we have more resources than we once did, we think we need more — a lot more!
What are our goals?
To help you publish your Latin content
We need more Latin readers for learners of all levels, and we need a lot of authors creating these readers. We think there are several impediments to making more Latin material available. First, it’s hard to find editors with a lot of experience writing polished Latin, much less editing. Writing Latin is a skill that’s barely taught in Classics curricula anymore, and if it is, it’s almost always only in a single semester of using an antiquated prose composition book. Additionally, some writers also may not want to take on formatting their own book or finding an artist who can illustrate their work for them. And finally, marketing your book can also be a daunting task. So, we’d like you to focus on getting creative and writing in Latin, and let us take care of the rest.
To publish our own Latin content
We also have a lot of ideas for our own Latin content! We have a lot of experience speaking and writing in Latin, both in academic and informal settings. We want to put these skills to use to create approachable, interesting, and comprehensible resources for Latin learners. Some of what we publish will be free in the form of audio and videos; some of it will be novellas or audio books. We intend to produce as much engaging content as possible for people learning Latin, especially at the intermediate level. Some topics we’ve already started working on are monsters, legends, and myths.
To organize and share resources
There are already tons of great resources available to help us learn and enjoy Latin. There are, in fact, so many it can be hard to sort through them and choose the ones that are most useful for you and your students. We will make regular blog posts that highlight and organize the resources already available to learners and enjoyers of the Latin language — and most of these resources are free!
To build around LLPSI
Lingua Latina Per Se Illustrata is a great nature method textbook, especially if your goal is to read historical Latin authors. However, there are some widely acknowledged issues with text, especially with the number of new vocabulary words introduced in each chapter. There just isn’t enough repetition of new words, and the number of unique words per chapter is quite high. This can be ameliorated by spending time reading more stories or other content that use the same vocabulary words before moving on to the next chapter. So, we’re interested in publishing more resources that “fill out” LLPSI — contact us if this is something you are interested in working on with us!
Lupus Alatus 