Read the originals.
One paragraph at a time.
Lectio is a structured reader for the great books in their original languages — Latin, Greek, Italian, French, German, Spanish, Russian, and Japanese. Built for students and lifelong readers who want to meet Virgil, Homer, Dante, Tolstoy, and Sōseki on their own terms.
Watch: The Aeneid — Introduction
Whether it's for class — or for the love of it.
Working through Virgil for AP Latin? Reading the Iliad for a Greek seminar? Preparing translation passages for an exam? Lectio gives you the original text alongside a careful word-by-word gloss and a full translation — so you can prep faster, check your own rendering, and actually understand what you're reading.
Or maybe there's no assignment at all. Maybe you just want to read Anna Karenina in Russian, or Kokoro in Japanese, the way the author wrote it. Lectio makes that possible too — a quiet, beautiful place to spend twenty minutes a day with the books that matter.
Why the original matters.
You don't have to be a scholar to read the great works in their own language. Even a slow, halting first encounter — original on one side, translation on the other — gives you something no translation alone can: the actual shape of the author's mind.
Take the death of Laocoön in Book II of the Aeneid. Virgil writes:
(...two serpents coil around Laocoön and his sons, their bodies literally wound through the line itself.)
Because Latin is inflected — every noun and adjective marked for case, number, and gender by its ending — Virgil could place the words almost anywhere he wanted and still have the sentence make sense. So he snakes the modifiers around their nouns the way the serpents snake around their victims. Look at the pairs the endings lock together:
- perfūsus … vittās — "drenched … fillets" (the participle reaches across two words to its noun)
- ātrō … venēnō — "black … venom" (adjective and noun separated by vittās, which they wrap around)
- eōdem … flātū — "with the same … breath" (split by tepefacta per ōra)
- cruentō … caede — "with bloody … slaughter" (wrapped around expulsa)
The matching endings (-us / -ās, -ō / -ō, -em / -ū, -ō / -e) tell the reader which words belong together, no matter how far apart they sit. The grammar enacts the horror. In English you can describe the scene; in Latin you watch it happen on the page.
And then Virgil closes the knot. The final word — recessit, "withdrew" — is a third-person singular perfect, a single verb that gathers every loose strand of the sentence into one completed action. The breath (flātū) that warmed the mouths, the slaughter (caede) that drove the serpent out, the venom (venēnō) and the gore (saniē) — all of them resolve into that one perfect tense at the end of the line. The coils that have been winding through four lines of hyperbaton finally release, and the snake slips away on the same syllable the sentence does.1
1 The reading above — both the four linked pairs and the closing observation on recessit as the verb in which the snake's coils finally release — follows a line-by-line analysis given by W. R. ("Ralph") Johnson in a two-person seminar on the Aeneid, University of Chicago, Fall 1982. With gratitude to Dr. Johnson and to my fellow student that term, the poet Vincent Katz — to whom this little corner of the page is dedicated.
That's what reading in the original gives you, and it's why even an imperfect attempt is worth the effort. Lectio is built to make that attempt worthwhile.
Five-stage cycle
Each paragraph cycles through original, interlinear gloss, side-by-side translation, and back to the original — until you've internalized it.
Word-by-word gloss
See a precise English equivalent under every word. No dictionary breaks the rhythm of your reading — and for Latin and Greek verse, optional macrons and scansion marks help you hear the meter.
A curated library
Hundreds of public-domain classics across eight languages, organized by author and date — plus the ability to search for any other public-domain work you want to read.
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