Updated and extended description, May 30 2025
This graduate course will begin by reading Ovid’s twin epic and elegiac versions of the Persephone myth in Metamorphoses 5 and Fasti 4 in their poetic contexts. It will then go on to explore in its unfinished entirety Claudian’s short epic De Raptu Proserpinae (c. 1170 lines), composed some four hundred years after Ovid.
More details on the Ovidian part of the course. Fasti 4 is on the PhD reading list, so we will linger on that book of Ovid’s extended elegiac calendar poem for a while, using the 1998 Cambridge ‘green and yellow’ text and commentary of Elaine Fantham (the one required textbook). Besides the tale of Persephone itself, which takes up almost all the entry for April 12, on the Ludi Cereris (Fast. 4.393-620), we will also read Ovid’s introduction to the month (Fast. 4.1-132), and his entry for April 21, covering the Parilia and Rome’s birthday (Fast. 4.721-862).
In Metamorphoses 5, in which Ovid encloses his epic and metamorphically enhanced version of the Persephone narrative (Met. 5.341-661) within an account of a visit by Pallas Athena to Mount Helicon, our reading will include the Heliconian frame as well as the Persephone episode itself: Met. 5.250-678. I will make available the relevant pages of the Oxford Text of R.J. Tarrant and the commentary of Gianpero Rosati; the latter is part of the 2024 variorum Cambridge Metamorphoses general-edited by Alessandro Barchiesi, revising a 2009 Italian publication.
Moving on to Claudian, we will cover all 1172 lines of the unfinished 3-book De Raptu Proserpinae, a short epic to which recent years have brought new attention and newly positive revaluation. I will make available the text(s) of J.B. Hall (whose 1969 ‘Cambridge orange’ edition of the poem remains influential, along with his Teubner) and, for daily use, the 1993 Oxford commentary of Claire Gruzelier. For the course’s oral presentation assignment, each of you will ‘adopt’ a segment of the DRP on which to give a short 5-10 minute introduction to set up the day’s translation and discussion.
The course’s paper assignment (due in exam week) can take one of two forms: (a) a conference-length paper (c.7-8 pp. of double-spaced text, not counting quotes, footnotes and bibl.) on any aspect of the course material; or (b) a written line by line commentary on a segment of the Claudian poem which, while making use of Gruzelier, should find ways to offer things unavailable in Gruzelier.
The total Latin reading assignment (some of it to be examined in one or two written translation tests, tba) will be just under 2200 lines. Although it will not be a set reading assignment, we will familiarize ourselves early on with the Homeric Hymn to Demeter, influential upon all three of our Latin Persephones.
I will put in an order for the one required textbook through the U Bookstore:
Elaine Fantham (ed.), Ovid: Fasti Book IV. Cambridge Greek and Latin Classics. CUP 1998
Please feel free to contact me with any questions: shinds@uw.edu