LATN 202

Latin

This course will start from the world and poetry of Catullus, one of the most spontaneous and personal of all ancient poets. Our attempt to reconstruct the Catullus that his friends and admirers knew in the mid-first century BCE 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. We will also look at the tradition of Latin Lyric in broader perspective, reading a series of authors in the medieval, renaissance and modern periods. In these we will see the rise of rhymed, stressed poetry, and then the renovation of ancient forms. The goal will be to gain an appreciation of one of the world's most influential and long-lived literary languages.