LATIN 5233

Roman Poetry

Course Description

Course information provided by the 2025-2026 Catalog.

Spring 2024 Topic: Latin Poetic Muses: Latin poetic muses were active over many centuries. They remain active today. This seminar provides an overview, through selected excerpts, of some of its moods, modes, and meters, and invites students to bring in some of their own favorite passages for discussion. We will try to convey not only the gist of a poet's "meaning," but also to regenerate any special figured language, including puns, anagrams, and acrostics, which inflect meaning in interesting ways and make Latin poetry different from most English language poetry after Chaucer. We will examine how Latin poetry is put together: how metrics and wordplay shape sense, and why "dictionary-based" translation routinely oversimplifies Latin originals. Horace, Ovid, and George Herbert will be our chief sources here. In epic, we'll read excerpts from Ennius, Lucretius, Virgil, Ovid, Lucan, Statius, and Carrara's eighteenth-century Columbus. We'll also look at Ovid's dialogue between his epic and elegiac identities. In lyric, epigram, satire, tragedy, and bucolic, we'll read passages from Terence, Seneca, Virgil, Horace, Persius, and Ausonius.

Prerequisites/Corequisites Prerequisite: one 5220-level Latin course.

Permission Note Enrollment limited to: graduate students.

Last 4 Terms Offered 2025FA, 2025SP, 2024SP, 2022FA

When Offered Spring.

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