Now can we do pre-reading with our students to prepare them to read this poem? Of course we can, and of course we should! But in a larger sense, we really can’t prepare ourselves to read such poems (i.e., not “this poem” but poems like it). Active Latin and comprehensible input on their own simply will not get us there. The amount of pre-reading and preparation you’d have to do to read Horace’s four books of Odes at sight is so enormous as to be all but impossible: reading through all of extant Latin literature would be a good start, but it still wouldn’t get you all the way there. And that is just to speak of vocabulary and not even to get into issues of cultural literacy, word order, syntactical oddities, textual troubles, and so forth—separate articles all!

Someone might point out that you don’t have to limit your reading to classical Latin, and they might suggest that you read contemporary novellas and other Latin written by later authors. I agree! I think that reading Renaissance Latin in particular has done a lot for my abilities to read Roman authors. Much of later Latin won’t count as comprehensible input for most Latin learners, but it offers an almost immeasurably greater variety of topics and levels than ancient Latin alone. Such texts still aren’t likely to teach you inuleus, but they will help reinforce a lot of other vocabulary. And some medieval and Renaissance texts really do count as level-appropriate, compelling, comprehensible input; some of this Latin really can be “read” in the SLA sense of the term. Such has been my experience, at any rate.

Nevertheless, reading later Latin has its own dangers: later authors were not native speakers of Latin, and they perforce lacked the Sprachgefühl needed to wield the language with native-speaker proficiency. We cannot necessarily trust their intuitions about word order, or distinctions between approximate synonyms, or any of a number of other relatively subtle points.There is, simply put, a danger that we may develop an inaccurate mental representation of the language. (And this is to say nothing of new associations with old words: if you speak Latin or read post-classical texts, what pops into your head when you see raeda or prelum?) I think in practice the benefits far outweigh the risks, but I’d suggest that you read later Latin for its own sake—and it is absolutely worthy to be read!—not just for its potential to help you read Caesar and Vergil. That’s just a side benefit.

Active Latin and comprehensible input alone are not going to make people perfect readers of ancient Latin literature, at least not for any future I can realistically imagine. For many—I suspect most—ancient Latin texts, there will remain some gap between our level of reading proficiency and the level that the text demands in order to be read fluently. That gap can be bridged by teachers and commentaries and dictionaries and perhaps by explicit knowledge about grammar and how the Latin language works, and we can in the end get meaning from these texts, and enjoy them, and eventually re-read them in the way that they were meant to be read. But on a first reading, that gap will be there for most of us most of the time.

What Active Latin can do, I suggest, is narrow that gap. Readers who never do anything but translate will have a much larger gap to bridge, and their journey is much longer and harder. On the other hand, readers who have worked to develop a sophisticated and accurate mental representation of the language through comprehensible input, wide reading, extensive listening, and so forth will still need to traverse a bridge from where they are to where the ancient Roman authors stand, but their journey is shorter and easier. Downhill rather than uphill, to change the metaphor a bit. They will have to look up a handful of words, but not every other word. They will have to consult commentaries, but when they do so, they will also get profit and pleasure from the consultation, not just an English crib of the Latin. They’ll even need to read translations sometimes, and that’s ok, because they won’t be solely reliant on them for their understanding of the Latin.