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Has there been a rigorous study of ranking the difficulty of ancient Latin authors? You often see (and, from personal experience, feel) the increase in difficult going from Caesar to Tacitus or Vergil to Juvenal, but I'm not aware of any actual study on this topic.

Of course, I know that there will always be some variation among individual learners depending on what textbook they used, what they've read before, what their interests are. Still, though, some features of literary writing are more difficult than others, so I'd be surprised if no one ever tried to compile a list that takes all that into account. It seems like it would be of great use for effective learning.

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    It's an interesting idea but how would one rigorously define a largely subjective concept like "difficulty"?
    – TKR
    Commented Mar 13, 2023 at 17:24
  • @TKR That's what I was hoping someone came up with! I can think of a few things, though: length of sentences, hypotaxis v. parataxis, amount of unusual words, and anastrophe immediately come to mind.
    – cmw ♦
    Commented Mar 13, 2023 at 17:58
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    Another measure of difficulty which might be even more objective is to try to estimate the variability within each author. i.e., how many different words, or "structures" one uses. For example Digesta Iustiniani can feature some fancy words and structures to a new reader of that work, however, if this work uses time and again the same structure and style with little variability it will ultimately render itself very readable.
    – d_e
    Commented Mar 13, 2023 at 20:44
  • I feel like you could do like @cmw suggests and mathematically rank based on sentence length and the number of common words versus uncommon.
    – Adam
    Commented Mar 13, 2023 at 23:51

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