Foundational
Latin Prose & Poetry

Students engage with passages drawn from Caesar’s account of one of the most dramatic crises of the Gallic campaigns: the treacherous destruction of Roman cohorts in winter quarters, engineered by the Belgic chieftain Ambiorix, and the subsequent siege of a Roman encampment by the Nervii. These are passages of extraordinary narrative intensity — deliberation in council on the eve of catastrophe, the trap that closes around a Roman column, acts of heroism under desperate circumstances, Sabinus’s last stand, the long weeks of siege endured by Quintus Cicero’s forces, the sending of letters through enemy lines, and Caesar’s swift march to the relief of his besieged legate. Students encounter Caesar not as the author of orderly military summaries but as a narrator of crisis, courage, disaster, and recovery — while mastering, through every sentence, the constructions that characterize his demanding prose: indirect statement, the ablative absolute, purpose and result clauses, and indirect questions. AP question types are practiced at every turn: multiple choice on grammar and syntax, translation, parsing, short analysis of rhetorical strategies, and short essay questions on themes of leadership, virtus, and the Roman response to adversity.

Students read passages concentrated in the epic’s first, second, and fourth books — the opening movements and the emotional center of the poem. From the first book: the proem’s declaration of theme, Juno’s furious intervention and the storm at sea, Neptune’s restoration of order and the great simile of the statesman that encodes the poem’s political philosophy, Aeneas’s landing in Libya and his steadying of his men, his approach to Carthage and his sight of the temple reliefs, and the Trojan embassy’s address to Queen Dido. From the second book: the ghost of Hector appearing to Aeneas in the night with his dark warning, and the moment amid the ruins of Troy when Aeneas catches sight of Helen and turns, in rage, toward violence — before Venus intervenes. From the fourth book: Mercury’s descent carrying Jupiter’s command to leave Carthage, and the death of Dido. Dactylic hexameter is taught systematically throughout — students mark quantities, identify the six feet, and distinguish spondaic from dactylic rhythmic effects as interpretive tools, not merely as metrical exercises. Poetic devices — the Homeric simile, golden lines, chiasmus, anaphora, enjambment, apostrophe, litotes, and hendiadys — are analyzed in every passage. Historical and philosophical discussions address Vergil’s complex relationship to the Augustan settlement, the tragic voices of Dido and Turnus that complicate the poem’s apparent triumphalism, and what it costs to fulfill a destiny.

Students read a carefully assembled group of poems that represents the full range of Catullus’s lyric achievement: the brief, witty dedication that opens his collection and announces his literary ambitions; the two sparrow poems with their tender playfulness and layered irony; the yacht poem, which traces a vessel’s biography from its forest origins to its final rest in a sacred lake, in the arresting choliambic meter that Catullus deploys for unsettled subjects; the great kiss poems that declare love in the language of the mathematically infinite; the bitter poem of self-command in which the speaker attempts, with evident psychological failure, to break his own attachment; a poem of social comedy involving a voyage and a boast that unravels; a poem of a dinner invitation conducted entirely on the speaker’s impossible terms; poems of friendship, literary wit, and pointed comic rebuke. Together, these poems establish Catullus’s full tonal range — from exuberant affection to devastating bitterness — and require students to engage with three distinct meter systems: hendecasyllabics, choliambs, and the Sapphic strophe. Socratic seminars address the nature of desire as Catullus understands it, the distinction between literary persona and lived experience, and what it means that this most personal of Latin poets has been read, without interruption, for two millennia.

Students encounter Ovid in two different meters and two very different registers, which is itself part of the instruction: comparing how a single poet thinks in elegiac couplets versus dactylic hexameter reveals how profoundly meter shapes poetic possibility. From the love elegies, students read the opening sequence of Ovid’s elegiac career: the famous recusatio in which Cupid literally steals a metrical foot from Ovid’s intended epic verse and forces him into the couplet; a poem of ardent petition that establishes the elegiac lover’s conventional posture; the soldier-lover poem, in which Ovid systematically demonstrates that every soldier’s experience has its precise erotic counterpart; and a poem of correspondence conducted through a trusted household messenger. From the great mythological compendium in dactylic hexameter, students read three extended narratives: the story of Daedalus and Icarus, whose aerial freedom ends in catastrophe; the story of Philemon and Baucis, the elderly Phrygian couple whose perfect hospitality is rewarded by the gods with transformation into two intertwining sacred trees; and the story of Pygmalion, the sculptor whose ivory creation comes, impossibly, to life. Ovid’s playful and ironic relationship to his Vergilian precursors is a central analytical thread throughout — students learn to identify his redeployment of epic language and conventions, the wit that underlies even his darkest transformations, and what his great poem of change proposes as an answer to the question of how anything survives.