Members: £190
Non-members: £240
Concessions: £30 (call the office 020 8340 3343)
Please note that this class takes place on the first floor meaning there is unfortunately no step-free access.
In this course we’ll be exploring the best of classical Latin literature – poetry and prose – with a focus on reading the texts, and figuring out what they are ‘saying’. There’s beauty and ugliness here, wit and crudity, poignancy and glory, mythmaking, irony and artifice, as these authors, each in their own way and in their own historical context, respond to the literary legacy of Greece, and set about creating, against the odds, something authentically Roman.
Texts will be distributed by email in advance. Participants are not required to translate the texts themselves, in class or at home – the instructor is there to take on the heavy lifting – but the course will be most suitable for those who already have some experience of reading Latin, however rusty.
This term, students will be finishing Catullus 64, a mini-epic on the marriage of Peleus and Thetis, and one of Roman literature’s hidden gems, before beginning Vergil’s Eclogues, a collection of ten poems in bucolic genre, which presents – in verse of extraordinary beauty – an idyllic Greek paradise of shepherds and song-contests continually destabilised and transformed by its engagement with Roman power at a time of violent political change.
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