Places to read Latin for free online
The Latin language is not solely the domain of posh people who want to be the prime minister or the richest of the rich. It is for everyone! It’s a really cool language that was used in so many places during so many time periods that, no matter what you like to read about, you will probably find something related that was written in Latin in the past 2000 years.
Not only that, it is a very convenient language for broke bibliophiles to learn because the vast majority of books written in Latin predate the very idea of copyright. Very little Latin is not in the public domain. What does that mean? It means that once you learn Latin you can read lots of beautiful poetry, thrilling philosophy, moving Ciceronian speeches, and more for free. Even the dictionaries and some old textbooks are free. All you need is the internet! And, of course, to know where to look.
When I am looking for an edition of a Classical Latin work, I usually search archive.org or Google books first for scans of a 19th century or earlier monolingual Latin edition. You want to search in Latin. That is to say, don’t look for “Vergil’s complete works” - look instead for “Opera Omnia Vergilii” or something similar. The older, free editions usually have Latin titles and commentaries, in my experience. The same is true of any early modern printed edition. Make sure you know the Latin name of the work you are looking for and the Latinized form of the author’s name. You can also find scans of manuscripts from libraries around the world on these two websites. The key is simply knowing the name of what you are looking for. This makes browsing difficult, however.
Searching the websites of individual libraries, such as the Vatican library, is an option, too, but many of these scans have been uploaded to other sites, such as those mentioned above.
If you are looking to browse free Latin, there are a number of websites, many of which contain not only ancient, but even more recent works. The trouble with these is that the transcriptions are sometimes imperfect; you may want to check them against each other if you come across something strange. They are also simply the works themselves, generally without a commentary or variae lectiones. If that is a problem, I suggest instead looking for public domain editions of works on Archive and Google books, as mentioned above.
Packhard Humanities Institute Latin texts - virtually all literary texts written in Latin before 200 AD can be found here.
Poesia Latina - despite the name, poetry and prose in both Latin and Greek can be found here.
Perseus - this will parse and find definitions for you, but I would not recommend getting into the habit of letting a computer tell you whether something is, say, an ablative if you want to become a proficient reader.
LacusCurtius - both Latin and Greek texts can be found here, but they tend to be things that were once more difficult to find elsewhere online (Grattius, Frontinus, Quintus Curtius) rather than the standard fare.
Project Gutenberg - a database of public domain ebooks with perhaps not as much Latin as I would like, although it is where I found Arcadius Avellanus’ translations of Treasure Islandand other modern literature (for more on Avellanus fellow, check out this very exciting PhD thesis my friend wrote). This is where I read Dickens, Shakespeare, gothic novels, Greek philosophers in English, and many other things as a teenager, so I’m including it out of sentimentality.
If you want to read Giovanni Pascoli’s Latin poems, which are very recent but still old enough to be public domain, there is also this website.
Another fascinating website is the Arx Latina, in which Latin periodicals of the 21st century are collected. There you can read through old editions of Juventus (1910-1944), Vox Urbis (1898-1913), and Melissa (1984-).
Please mention any other sites that you have found useful in the comments.