- Winter 2023
Syllabus Description:
Latin 306 A Wi 23: Cicero and Ovid
Instructor: Joseph Bringman
This course continues UW’s second-year Latin sequence from Latin 305. But also, if you completed the first year of college Latin strongly, this course will probably be a good fit even without Latin 305, and so too if you are looking for a first university course in Latin after a full program of high school Latin. The first five or six weeks of the quarter will be devoted to the prose writings of one of the leading Roman public figures and intellectuals, Cicero, and the rest of the quarter to the mythological epic narratives of Ovid’s Metamorphoses. From Cicero we will read samples of his political oratory, philosophical writing, and even his personal correspondence, providing us a range of genres in prose to explore before crossing over to the Ovidian dactylic hexameter. The emphasis will be upon line-by-line translation, detailed interpretation, and broader literary and cultural contexts.
Required texts
A Cicero Reader. Selections from Five Essays and Four Speeches, with Five Letters. James M. May
Selections from Ovid’s Metamorphoses. William S. Anderson, Mary Purnell Frederick