Classics: Latin (CLSL)

This is an intensive introduction to the Latin language. By the end of the year, students will have been introduced to all basic Latin morphology and syntax and will be able to read texts in the original with the aid of a dictionary. Unabridged selections from works by Julius Caesar and the poet Catullus are studied in the spring semester.

Latin II is the second course in the two-semester set of First Year Latin. In this second half, students will read Latin from original texts written in both prose and poetry. In particular, for prose, Caesar’s Commentarii de bello Gallico, Book 1, will provide us with both textbook grammar cases and an overview of Rome’s foreign policy in the first century BC. For poetry, we will read a selection from the poems written by Catullus, the first lyric and elegiac Roman poet whose work was transmitted to us (almost) completely; as a condition for, and a function of, reading verse, students will be also introduced to classical metrics (especially stichic hexameter, elegiac couplet, and hendecasyllable). Caesar, Bellum Gallicum 1, will be read from Ewan’s edition for Bristol Classical Press; Catullus from Garrison’s anthology The Student’s Catullus (Oklahoma); both books are available at the GU’s bookshop.

Intermediate Latin is intended for students who have successfully completed Latin II at Georgetown or have otherwise acquired the ability to read Latin texts in the original, with a good basic knowledge of vocabulary and grammar. While these same elements (vocabulary, morphology, syntax) will be constantly reviewed and constitute an essential part of home and class work, a new stress will be increasingly posed on matters related to literary genres, poetic diction, rhetoric, meter, etc. In fact, students will be introduced to handling Latin literature directly, and especially through the study of those very authors that represent the basis for virtually all grammatical notions and abstractions so far learned, i.e. Cicero and Virgil. Satisfies COL language requirement.

A survey of drama at Rome, from its origins to the high empire. We will examine what sorts of theatrical entertainments the Romans staged, where and when they took place, who performed in them, and how they were scripted—and also how these scripts came to be viewed as ‘literature.’ Readings in Latin will include one comedy of Plautus (Menaechmi), one tragedy of Seneca (Phaedra), fragments of otherwise lost dramas, as well as other Greek and Latin plays in translation and selected modern studies. There will be special emphasis in the first part of the class on the peculiar features of Plautus’ language, and throughout the semester on mastering the basic dramatic meters.

The tragedies of Seneca the Younger are rhetorically sophisticated, engrossing, and devastating. In this advanced Latin course, we will read Seneca’s Phaedra and Thyestes in Latin, with careful attention to meter and style. Discussion will focus on the author’s reworking of models from Augustan literature, alongside Greek drama and myth. With their florid verbal imagery and harrowing plots, these tragedies speak across the centuries about questions at the heart of human experience. In a world of inexpressible evil and gruesome death, have the gods forsaken us?

The earliest Latin literary texts surviving intact are the comedies of Plautus, which date to the late 3rd and early 2nd centuries BC. In this course, we will read Plautus’ Mostellaria, in which a wayward son takes advantage of his father’s absence to throw a monumental house party, and Amphitruo, a send-up of the gods and romantic jealousies that Plautus referred to as a “tragicomedy.” By translating these plays, we will become familiar with the unique style and diction of early Latin. Plautus’ bawdy and clever comedies not only offer insight in ancient Roman literature and culture, but also remain amusing in the present day.

Lucretius is a poet whose only surviving work, a six-book poem On the Nature of Things, has represented for centuries a model of prodigious inventiveness, sublime imagery, and intellectual militancy. In the context of 1st-century Rome, near the end of its existence as a free republic, Lucretius authored a poetic masterpiece with which he tried to explain the origin and functioning of all things from a rational standpoint, based on the theories of previous Greek thinkers, especially Epicurus, with the intention of communicating such universal truths to a modern, Roman audience. To accomplish such a challenging cultural project, Lucretius chose the form of a poem in dactylic hexameters, one that had long been assigned to epic poetry since Homer’s Iliad and Odyssey. However, within the realm of epic poetry, a sub-genre had also emerged and flourished, whereby authors “taught” their readers regarding specific subjects: this is called didactic poetry. Whereas such a genre had been practiced in Greece since the 8th century BC, Rome still did not know many examples of it. In fact, after Ennius, the founder of Roman epic, had written his Annales on the history of Rome, almost no noteworthy examples remain of any kind of dactylic poetry before Lucretius, who therefore represents an extremely important stage in the development of the genre, and the very meter that will be consecrated to eternal admiration by Vergil, a few decades later. Thus, the study of Lucretius is especially necessary for students of Latin epic poetry, history of classical literature, and anyone who wants to understand what the most notable authors of the classical canon, such as Vergil, were reading while composing their masterpieces. More generally, Lucretius’ scope is one that encompasses the whole galaxy of things that exist in the universe, from the smallest atoms – a concept developed by the Greeks, and beautifully articulated by Lucretius in poetic diction – to the most complex construct, humanity, with its unique ability to apply reason to the comprehension of both the letter and the broader meaning of the Book of Existence. Ultimately, this is a text that celebrates human intellect, its capacity to understand itself and the external world, and the literary history which is one fundamental aspect of that intellect, as Lucretius’ own unparalleled artistry manifests.

Achilles is celebrated as a quintessential hero in Homeric epic, yet he was the subject of a number of Latin poems that view the hero from different perspectives, from his boyhood to his death at Troy. This course will read accounts of Achilles in Catullus, Vergil, Horace, Ovid, and Statius and consider the ways in which Roman poets used the familiar epic hero for their own purposes. By focusing upon the representation of Achilles in a range of texts, students will also gain a broader sense of Latin literary history.

Are letters literature? We will pursue this question as we read the correspondence of two important Roman public figures, Cicero (106-43 BCE) and Pliny the Younger (c. 61-c. 112 CE). Collections of each man’s correspondence were carefully crafted and published in antiquity, either during his lifetime or shortly after his death. We will consider when, why, and how these letters might be read by others than their addressee, and what we can learn from them about ancient Roman culture, friendship, politics, and literature.

Like Cicero, Gaius Sallustius Crispus (b. 86 BCE) started his career as a political outsider of sorts—though still as a member of the moneyed elite. Unlike Cicero, Sallust was decidedly a different type of politician—and author. A known populist, he was expelled from the senate and came to support Julius Caesar in the civil war with Pompey but then withdrew from politics to write historical monographs. In this course, students will study Sallust’s Bellum Catilinae, an account of the (so-called) conspiracy of Catiline, as well as fragments from his longer and largely lost annalistic Historiae. Attention will be paid to Sallust’s distinctive style, the influence of other authors and the political context on his work, as well as how his account of the Catilinarian affair does and does not cohere with other accounts, namely Cicero’s. The representation of other literary genres within Sallust’s historiography, such as oratory, will also be considered alongside the question of how to approach literary fragments. In addition to translation assignments and exams, students will also work on a commentary project and a short research paper.

Marcus Tullius Cicero was ancient Rome’s greatest trial lawyer. He usually spoke for the defense but in 70 BC, at a key point in his career, he prosecuted a former governor of Sicily, Gaius Verres, for abusing the justice system, unauthorized taxation, and theft of artworks. In this class, we will read in Latin the concluding part of Cicero’s published speech against Verres, paying close attention to Cicero’s rhetorical techniques. We will also study how Cicero put his case together and how Rome’s criminal courts functioned. The class is planned to include a meeting with a federal prosecutor and we will consider similarities and differences between the Roman and American legal systems.

Marcus Tullius Cicero is widely considered the greatest orator in Roman history—a tireless advocate for democracy and the rule of law who fought to preserve the Rome he loved against the specter of empire. This class is not about that. Cicero was also one of the foremost practitioners of Roman invective, a ruthless insult comic who deployed every rhetorical trick available to highlight his targets’ violations of Roman norms. In this class, students will closely examine Ciceronian invective as both literature and history. Cicero’s attacks on figures like Catiline, Verres, and Marc Antony not only demonstrate the orator’s incredible facility with language but also the complex network of social expectations his opponents allegedly transgressed. Students will translate selections of Cicero’s most famous speeches with an eye towards understanding them as a literary product, and will also discuss the cultural and political context that made Cicero’s attacks so venomous. Students will be tested on this material with two translation-based exams and two papers.

Rhetoric was at the heart of Roman political culture. In this course, we will study the literary techniques and strategies of Roman oratory. In a richly imagined dialogue (On the Orator), Cicero offered the definitive account of the purpose of persuasive speech and the ideal attributes of the Roman orator. A century and a half later, Tacitus’ Dialogue on Oratory closely emulated Ciceronian style, while raising urgent questions about cultural decline and the impact of politics on the written word. By investigating how and why Tacitus looked to Cicero as his model, students in this course will develop a critical understanding of how Cicero became such a towering figure in the history of Latin prose literature.

Livy’s massive Ab urbe condita covered the history of Rome from its foundation to the time of Augustus. Of the 142 books that he wrote, 35 survive in more or less complete fashion. This class will read Book 1. The first book contains many famous stories (Romulus and Remus, the rape of the Sabine Women, the rape of Lucretia, the Horatii and Curiatii) of Rome’s early history and the transition from the so-called regal period to a republican form of government. While the course will explore the historical and cultural contexts for the events told by Livy, we will constantly focus and concentrate on Livy’s particular style of Latin, as well as the techniques that underlie his historical account. Students will develop a strong understanding of Livy’s handling of elements of historical prose (e.g. the arrangement of time, the idea of truth) as well as of his depiction of topics such as religion, sexuality, the family, and the role of the individual within the broader community.

A literary masterpiece, Petronius’ Satyricon is the story of a young man, Encolpius, and his friends and their encounters with a series of absurd characters in what seems to be a Greek city but can also be taken as a parody of emperor Nero’s Rome. A highlight of the novel is the Cena Trimalchionis, a first-person narration of a banquet at the house of an extravagant freedman, Trimalchio, a model for F. Scott Fitzgerald's Gatsby. The text of the Satyricon will be read in the original, with attention to its language and style as well its literary complexity and the diversity of viewpoints displayed.

The historian Tacitus was the supreme storyteller of imperial Rome. In his Annals he gives a sizzling exposé of the Roman ruling class under the early emperors. Tacitus highlights the gap between what emperors and their supporters said and what they actually did. Only the historian’s careful study of the record and deep understanding of long periods of time can uncover the true workings of institutions and the motives behind people’s actions. This course starts with an introduction to the life, times, and works of Tacitus, a successful trial lawyer, senator, and priest, before he became a historian. We then explore Tacitus’ depiction of the emperor Tiberius in the first six books of The Annals. Topics for consideration include Tacitus’ sources of information, the construction of his narrative, and his style; and Tiberius the man, the nature of his succession, the rise of an imperial court, the development of treason trials, and the governance of the Roman empire. Tacitus’ later influence, especially on Edward Gibbon’s Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, is also discussed.

This is an advanced Latin class that introduces students to ancient biographical writing through a reading of the Caesars of Suetonius, secretary of correspondence to the emperor Hadrian. In addition to a close study of Suetonius and the role of literary culture at the imperial court, we consider the origins of biographical writing in Rome, its growth under the empire, later lives of Roman emperors inspired by the earlier tradition (including Einhard’s life of Charlemagne), and the Romans' contribution to the development of biographical writing up to the present day.

This course will have as its object the mythological epic poem Metamorphoses, written by Ovid in the first few years of the 1st century AD. Ovid had long been a very successful elegiac poet and represented himself as a most skilled praeceptor amoris, “teacher of love”. But at the apex of the Principate, the new political regime established in Rome by Octavian Augustus, Ovid decided to partake in the rhetoric surrounding the new socio-political and cultural reality by responding to Vergil’s Aeneid, which had just become a “classic” in the 1st century BC. Vergil re-founded Latin literature in such a way that anyone aspiring to take a seat at the table of canonical authors had to confront and deal with the formal and ideological aspects of his epic poem. Ovid did so in his own way, as he never abandoned his wittiness, ambiguity, and literary resourcefulness, on account of which his materials stand out from the entire classical canon and have made him one recognizable, and very often extensively imitated, model for writers from both his own time and posterity. Among many revolutionary aspects of his work is the very choice of myth, and in particular stories of transformation, as the poem’s main theme, with a very complex and sometimes elusive web of interconnections among stories serving as its structure. The poem winds up being, as promised in the proem, a history of the universe and one that will find its conclusive justification with the arrival on earth of Julius Caesar and his son Augustus.

Horace (65 - 8 BC), the most versatile Roman poet, is perhaps most famous for his brilliant lyric poetry contained in his Odes. This course will focus upon the Odes (as well as some of the Epodes) in an effort to understand Horace's construction of his lyric voice. In order to do so, we will examine, among other things, technical features of Horace’s diction and meter, as well as broader themes of politics, mythology and Roman culture. Students will gain a much deeper awareness of literary production and creativity in the ancient world, and will be able to discuss Latin and antiquity in general from a markedly different perspective.

The Roman poet Horace (65 - 8 BC) presents many of his most probing, scathing, and hilarious reflections on poetry and society in his Satires and Epistles. The most distinctive feature of these poems is the vivid self-exploration of the poet himself, a figure carefully crafted from literary and philosophical precedents. The Satires and Epistles offer an extended meditation on freedom and dependency in Roman literature, politics, and daily life at the transition from Republic to Empire. In this course, we will read a selection of these poems, with attention to genre, style, diction, and meter.

Seneca’s tragedies brilliantly explore fundamental themes of the tragic genre (e.g. family, love, political life, gods, revenge). This course will focus on the Phaedra, which concerns the twisted love felt by Phaedra for her stepson Hippolytus, and Thyestes, which focuses upon the corrupt and perverse household of Thyestes and his brother Atreus (the father of Agamemnon). Both plays take as their point of departure deeply dysfunctional relationships within a family and then develop them in quite different and explosive ways. Close attention will paid to Seneca’s use of meter and diction in a dramatic context, as well as practical aspects—such as staging, performance—of Senecan (and, more generally, Roman) drama. We will also discuss the significant influence of Seneca’s handling of the genre upon later writers such as Shakespeare, and we will also look back to some classical Greek drama as a way to understand better some of Seneca’s technique.

Near the end of his life Seneca, a speech-writer and aide to the emperor Nero, withdrew from politics and began work on an innovative series of philosophic letters. Addressed to his friend Lucilius but intended for a wider readership, the letters mix vignettes from Roman life with Stoic teachings to show how to overcome personal setbacks and achieve happiness. Seneca offers advice on what kind of books to read, how to build friendships, and many other practical matters. He also satirizes the Romans of his day for their garish villas, wasteful dinner parties, and cruel treatment of slaves. In this class, we read a selection of Seneca’s letters in Latin and discuss his use of the epistolary form, his penchant for graphic imagery and witty aphorisms, and his influence on later literature and the resurgence of interest in Stoicism today.

Elegiac poetry addressed a wide range of themes such as love, sadness, politics, and mythology. As such, it was a genre that allowed writers to reflect upon a broad range of the human experience, and, moreover, for the poets themselves to reflect upon their own representations of those themes. In some sense, this poetry is the most self-conscious art that we have from the ancient world, and this class will introduce students to poetry written primarily in the 1st c. BC by authors such as Catullus, Propertius, Tibullus, and Ovid. Students will become familiar with the ways in which poets create and innovate within the genre and within the metrical format of the elegiac couplet (a hexameter followed by a pentameter). Close attention will be paid to Latin diction and poetic style.

This course offers an introduction to satire in verse, a genre invented by Romans and imitated widely from the Renaissance onwards. Students will become acquainted with the origins of Roman satire and the way it changed as freedom of speech was circumscribed under the rule of the emperors. Readings in Latin will be one book each of satires by Horace and Juvenal, to be supplemented with a few other shorter selections. Special emphasis is placed throughout on distinctive features of the satirists’ language, their manipulation of poetic meter, and their use of (often unreliable) internal narrators. We shall also look briefly at the greatest imitators of the Roman satirists writing in English, Alexander Pope and Samuel Johnson.

Roman authors often worked in genres developed by the Greeks but verse satire was their own creation. Its last great practitioner, Juvenal, wrote at Rome’s imperial height, in the early second century CE. His early poems call out the criminals and fools populating the streets of the city and the mansions of the rich. In later works, indignation gives way to cooler cynicism: all human beings are prone to delusion. In this class, we will read all of Juvenal’s first book of satires and selected poems from the rest of his corpus. Topics for discussion include Juvenal’s relationship to earlier satirists and philosophers, his grand epic style, and the reliability of his narrators. We will also look at later imitations of his poems such as Samuel Johnson’s London and The Vanity of Human Wishes and see how Juvenal has shaped ideas of satire up to the present day.

This course will have as its object the novel Metamorphoses, aka The Golden Ass, written by Apuleius of Madaurus in the 2nd century AD. Written on the basis of a Greek novel, Apuleius’s Latin version represents a milestone both in the tradition of ancient novel as a genre and specifically in the development of Latin prose artistry, as well as having been a model for later novelists. Far from employing the weighty prose of historians or the vehement style of orators, Apuleius entertains readers with funny puns and clever narrative twists while they read of the adventurous, scary or magical episodes in the life of Lucius, a young man who at some point morphs into a donkey and has to endure multiple vicissitudes until a goddess finally gives him back his human form. Students will read large portions of novel in Latin (the remainder in English), from both the main story and the secondary tales. While the skill to read Apuleius’s brand of Latin will be a worthy achievement in itself, special attention will also be paid to broader literary questions of genre, narratology and style.

In this course we will read an intimate portrait of the life and times of an ancient Roman and saint in his own words, unmediated by any translation. Augustine’s Confessions is often credited with defining the genre of autobiography, and there can be no doubt that its influence on later literature has been profound. It also happens to be highly entertaining and almost novelistic in its characters and unexpected situations, but at the same time disarming in its apparent honesty and realism. Through close reading, students will increase their knowledge of everyday life in the Roman empire while viewing it from the perspective of one of that empire’s greatest minds.

This course will focus on Boethius’ most famous work, the Consolatio Philosophiae. Written in the early sixth century by a Roman senator facing execution, the Consolatio is a profound philosophical meditation on human nature that straddles the divide between classical antiquity and the Middle Ages. Its influence on later literature would be hard to overstate, and its authorial voice, calmly rational in the face of great adversity, has brought comfort to generations. Composed in alternating prose and poetry, the Consolatio has a multifaceted quality that encompasses many genres from autobiography to epic. The text will be read in the original Latin.

A survey of how the Latin language was put to use at different periods during the middle ages and what those uses reveal about different periods of medieval culture. Some authors to be read include Bede, Gregory of Tours, Einhard, Alcuin, Thomas Aquinas, Abelard and Petrarch.

This class, a complement to the semester-long course on the Aeneid (CLSL 310), is devoted to continuous reading of Vergil’s early works, the Eclogues and Georgics. The Eclogues are a collection of ten bucolic poems representing an ideal countryside where shepherds and other rustic figures dialogue in hexameters; under the pretense of pastoral simplicity, a rich poetic diction and a complex system of values are summoned to discuss matters ranging from love to politics, from sorrow to the relevance of literature for life. The Georgics are four books of didactic poetry, i.e. a genre meant to teach the readers a specific discipline – in this case, farming. Despite the apparently prosaic subject, the poem subtly deals with important questions of ethics, politics, and intellectual history, and does so with ample use of literary devices such as the tale of Orpheus in the Underworld, which has inspired many later authors in the history of European arts. Finally, a quick look will be given at some of the texts that, after Vergil’s death, were wrongly attributed to him but which represented Vergil’s earliest works for centuries after his death.

Students will read all 12 books of the Aeneid, one of the great masterpieces of Latin literature, over the semester. The pace of the course will roughly be one book per week; we will translate some of the material each class, and there will be quizzes on material that is not covered in class. There will also be extensive discussion about Vergilian meter, diction and style, and the way in which the these aspects contribute to a broader understanding of the complexities of the work as whole. Perhaps most importantly, by reading the poem in a linear fashion without interruption, students will gain a better sense of the structure and themes of the poem.