I. The Authors

Our four authors were selected from three central periods of Roman literature to offer a range of Latin style and period. Cicero and Catullus represent the Latin of the Ciceronian Age (70-30 BCE), Ovid the Latin of the Augustan period (30 BCE-17 CE), and Pliny the Younger Silver Age Latin (18-138 CE).

Two prose authors (Cicero and Pliny the Younger) and two poets (Catullus and Ovid) were chosen to allow students to experience the differences between prose and poetry that transcend authorial style. The two prose authors, Cicero and Pliny the Younger, enjoyed public careers both as orators and prominent statesmen. The two poets devoted themselves to the practice of their art, through writing and reading: Catullus specialized in lyric meters and Ovid in the meter of the elegiac couplet.

Beyond their differences in genre, our four authors offer interesting life perspectives. All were born in Italy and came to Rome in early manhood; three of them, Cicero, Ovid, and Pliny the Younger, were drawn to the capital for the purpose of studying rhetoric. Catullus (84-54 BCE) was born in Verona, into a wealthy aristocratic family; Cicero (106-43 BCE) was born in Arpinum, into a family of equestrian rank; Ovid (43 BCE-17 CE) was born in Sulmo, into an old equestrian family; Pliny the Younger (61/2-111/113 CE) was born in Comum, also into an equestrian family (he was the son of a landowner and the nephew of Pliny the Elder). Two of the four, Cicero and Catullus, lived in Rome at the same time, although they moved in very different circles.

II. The Texts: Three passages were selected from a single representative work of each author, thus offering the reader the benefit of variety and coherence: Catullus' Carmina, Cicero's De Amicitia, Ovid's Amores, and Pliny the Younger's Epistulae. The texts are a mixture of familiar and less-familiar passages, in several genres: lyric poetry, philosophic essay, elegy, and informal letters. The selected poems were written by young men; the prose pieces were written by men in their seniority. The poems celebrate physical attraction and risky amatory liaisons; the prose selections consider the nature of friendship among men, the love of husband and wife, the humane association of master and slave, and a statesman's preference for his country retreat, his place of refuge, over Rome, the seat of his responsibility.

Twelve texts of some thirty lines each seem the appropriate number of supplementary readings for a one-semester Intermediate-Latin college course.

III. The Theme:

The passages were chosen around the theme of relationships. It seemed to the planners that while the Romans expended a great deal of energy in building and maintaining relationships at all levels of society, the less formal, personal relations tended to be eclipsed by the more public social and political ties. Furthermore, subversive, un-Roman ideas and attitudes, such as those expressed by Catullus and Ovid, were obscured by the more conventional voices of the dominant culture, such as those of Cicero and Pliny the Younger. In her Presidential Address to the American Philological Association in 1997, Professor Susan Treggiari undertakes to place Cicero in his physical and cultural setting, in an attempt to reveal the interrelationships between the public and private domains of public figures like Cicero and Pliny.

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