Course Description: This course will focus on the poetry of Catullus, one of the most spontaneous and personal of all ancient poets, and especially on his celebrated and stormy relationship with Lesbia. Our attempt to reconstruct the Catullus that his friends and admirers knew in the mid-first century B.C. will lead us into several basic forms of inquiry: first, what exactly Catullus was expressing in his poems; then what artifice he used to express himself; and finally how he would have performed his poetry when he read to an audience (as probably would have been the standard mode of dissemination). At the end of the semester we will look at two of Catullus' contemperoraries, Lucretius and Cicero. Each of the three authors will give us a different perspective on the timeless theme of love, as well as an opportunity to understand Catullus' personal experiences in the context of his culture. Finally the course will make the leap to the 21s century by going on line, and thus members of the class will be expected to open accounts with computer services and become familiar with the relatively simple workings of a web browser.
Requirements: For each week's reading, students will be required to read the poem carefully enough to be able to:
Grading:
Text: The text will be found on the World Wide Web at the following address. A hard copy may be purchased from the departmental secretary for a nominal fee.
The URL or address of the document is:
http://www.urich.edu/~wstevens/lat202txts.htm
N.B. The Department of Classical Studies does not allow make up tests under any circumstances, nor does it accept late work. This is an unswerving policy of the instructor also.
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