I took basic Latin in college. Like most of my subjects, I put no effort into it. We had a final that I desperately needed to pass, and we knew the passage would be from a certain section of Virgil's Aeneid -- a few stanzas plucked from about 200 lines.

My roommate, who was a literary buff, had a version of the Aeneid much like the one you describe; Latin on one side, English on the other. I memorized the entire 200 lines in English.

It was a modern translation, too -- so it was colloquial, and didn't read like John Dryden.

Naturally, when I found on the test the appropriate keyword, such as Dido, or Aeneas, I said -- ah yes, this is the paragraph, and then conjured the lines in English from memory.

I think I got a B on the final -- I didn't do very well on the section conjugating verbs, but he said he liked my translation a good deal, even if I did take a few liberties with it.

Have you see the fairly new edition of Thucydides? Heavily annotated and with lots of maps. For me, it made the book much more manageable.

I've got the Landmark Thucydides with VD Hanson's introduction, if that's the one you mean, although I confess I haven't read it yet.

Coloss - The one thing I regret is not keeping up my Latin in college. In high school, I never got to Virgil - we did Caesar, Sallust and some Cicero, but I started the wrong year to reach the poetic section of the curriculum. Too bad, too.

Wait, did you just do back to back reviews of Xenephon AND South Park?

And yes, the VDH into Thucydides is wicked awesome! I've used it in class and the kids like it for the maps and stuff.

Equal time for all the voices in my head...

I took 4 years of honors Latin from the Jesuits. Won first place in the Texas JCL annual Latin convention in reading comprehension my fourth year (the poetry year). But I couldn't stand Virgil. Ovid was OK. I far preferred third-year rhetoric (Cicero) and second-year Caesar to the poetry.

I, too, let Latin lapse. I've kept my German in somewhat better shape, mainly because I took it for five years in college, and achieved a fair degree of speaking and writing fluency. That, and it's a living language, so I can review web sites and see movies with German in them. (The only spoken Latin in the world is ecclesiastical, which is different from the classical version we learned).

John, it's funny you mention that. I used to have a tape of some Monteverdi choral music performed by some East Bloc state orchestra and I would swear they were using classical pronunciations - "ex-kel-sis" instead of "ex-chel-sis", for example.