This book follows very much the format and audience of Volume III reviewed above, and has the same strengths. The two themes it covers are Social Criticism and Villains. The former has a selection from Horace's Satires, Odes and Epodes, with some Martial as a contrast. The latter pairs up Livy's stories of Lucretia and Verginia and compares the actions of the male protagonists (and the political ramifications) with Virgil's account of Mezentius in Book X of the Aeneid and with Catilina as portrayed by Sallust.
Jaeger has the same balance of grammatical rigour and literary comment, with full notes on grammar and content. The latter notes have some good asides. She is particularly good at unpicking some of the longer, more complex sentences in the Livy and explaining them grammatically in a way which not only makes the Latin clear, but also illuminates how the word order adds impact to the content. More generally, she seems as interested in displaying approaches and in developing skills as in giving definitive answers to the literary side of the works.
In her introduction, Jaeger comments that she has kept ambitious IB students in mind, but also hopes that their teachers will learn from it as well. She could have added students who have started Latin at university. She has a good literary sense and meets this aim well.
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