Tag: Martial

Posted on

Assignment for Wednesday, 04.29.20

Dear Satirists,

For Wednesday, April 29, please do the following.

(1) Read and translate

  • Martial, Epigrams 26, 35, 80, and 18.

(2) Review carefully the compendium (sent via email) of your peers’ annotations on Freudenberg (2018). As before, ask yourselves these questions as you proceed.

  • What did you notice about the piece that your peers did not? And vice versa?
  • Would your peers’ annotations help them with a theoretical semester project on Roman satire? Why or why not?
  • What best practices for annotations might you extrapolate from the compendium?

Thanks again for agreeing to this special class session — one additional day has really made all the difference.

DC

Posted on

Assignment for Friday, 04.24.20

Dear Satirists,

For Friday, April 24, please do the following.

  • Read and translate Martial, Epigrams 23, 25, 29, 31, 37, 38, 45, 51, 60, 70, and 71 (as numbered in the Watson & Watson commentary).

All Latin poetry deserves a content warning of some kind, but this round of poems especially so: primarily sexual content and body shaming, but no doubt you will encounter other themes that challenge our contemporary notions of correctness.

Remember that we read these epigrams in connection with the genre of satire, and not for the purpose of titillating ourselves with naughty verses (as was often the case in schoolboy receptions of Juvenal).

DC

Posted on

Assignment for Wednesday, 04.22.20

Dear Satirists,

For Wednesday, April 22, please do the following:

(1) Read G. B. Conte on Martial, a contemporary of Juvenal and author of epigrams that do much of the same work as Roman satire. Unlike other Conte essays, you can read this one in its entirety; it’s the perfect length, and it doesn’t need to jump around between authors or separate bodies of work. As usual, note anything that resonates with you, so we can discuss it in class.

(2) Read and translate Martial, epigrams 1, 7, and 19 (as numbered in our Cambridge edition). The commentary by Watson & Watson is very generous, even to the point of prefacing each poem with a helpful summary. Let’s see what these poems have to say, as a group, about Martial and his art.

(3) Download, print, and fill in scansion drill 8. This will be our only formal foray into the elegiac couplet. We’ll discuss it in class, and then you can turn it in by email by Friday.

DC

css.php