Latin 462: Latin Literature of the Augustan Age Winter 2022
Latin erotic elegy
Prof. Stephen Hinds shinds@uw.edu
5 credits, VLPA
T TH 2:30-4:20 pm, Mary Gates Hall (MGH) 085
Method of instruction: in-person
Update 12-31-21: In line with the university-wide decision to switch most courses temporarily to remote instruction for the first week of classes in Winter Quarter, our first class meeting at 2:30 pm on Tuesday January 4 will be on Zoom: please use this Zoom link to join this opening session:
https://washington.zoom.us/j/96569488166
I am sending the full version of this Zoom link (with its technical data) to the class email list too.
There will be no class meeting on Thursday January 6: I have an academic commitment at the annual convention of the Society of Classical Studies (taking place online, but in real time).
Unless new information changes this, the class will meet in person from week 2 onwards, starting Tuesday January 11, in line with the current university plan to return most things to normal on January 10. (I have scheduled a Zoom session for January 11 too, but I hope we won't need it!)
The elegiac couplet is a meter with a long history in Greek and in Latin. However, in the later decades of the first century BCE, a particular way of handling the meter gathered momentum and led to the heyday of collections of what moderns refer to as Latin love elegy. A succession of poets (mostly male, but one known female) wrote cycles of first-person elegies describing the tribulations of a lover who is immersed in a high-maintenance affair with a beloved (whose identity is concealed under a pseudonym). These elegiac lovers characteristically distance themselves from the duties associated with public life and Roman citizenship, veer between self-promotion and self-pity, and dramatize their situations with sustained appeals to myth. We will focus especially on the erotic elegies of Propertius and Ovid, but will look at the whole history of the genre, from the lost poet Gallus, via Tibullus as well as Propertius and Ovid, to the female poet Sulpicia.
Textbook: a required reader with commentary will be available through the U Bookstore: Paul Allen Miller, Latin Erotic Elegy: An Anthology and Reader (Routledge 2002).
Note that the department’s Latin/Greek 461-2-3 cycles change every year: a course like Latin 462 can be taken more than once during your undergraduate career.
This is an upper-level Latin reading class, which presupposes first-year and some second-year college Latin coursework, or equivalent. Please email the instructor if unsure whether your level of Latin language work is right for this class. The other option is Latin 306, also offered in Winter Quarter, which is in our second year (intermediate) Latin sequence.