Course Syllabus

In this year’s Latin 4 and Latin 5 course, listed in the Program of Studies as Roman Authors: 1, we are translating the poetry of Ovid, whose work has influenced many authors, including Dante, Shakespeare, and James Joyce.  Such stories from Ovid’s Metamorphoses as Daedalus and Icarus, Pyramus and Thisbe, and Midas have long captured the imaginations of readers, writers, and artists.  We shall also read selections from Ovid’s Fasti, the calendar book, in which the author recounts myths and legends associated with particular days of the year, and his Tristia, the poet’s account in verse of autobiographical detail, including the sadness of his last years spent in permanent banishment from Rome upon the order of Augustus. 

Later in the year we shall study Cicero’s First Oration Against Catiline, a prose work in which the orator and statesman Cicero brings to light Catiline’s attempted coup against the Roman state.  We shall address the historical and political context of the speech, the significance of the people involved in the event, and the role of the orator in the ancient world.