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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). Near the end of the semester we will look at the tradition of Latin Lyric in broader perspective, reading several authors in the medieval and modern periods. In these we will see the rise of rhymed, stressed poetry, and then the renaissance of ancient forms. 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:
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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