organisation
Please scroll down for Term 2
Term 1 (Autumn 2025)
Lectures: Mondays 10-12am
Latin text classes: Tuesdays 12-1pm
nb: each week, everyone will attend a two-hour session consisting of 1 hour of more formal lecture, and 1 hour of seminar-style, question-led group work and discussion. In addition, Q800 / Classics & English students will have an additional hour-long class in which we will look in detail at the prescribed Latin texts (these students should do as much preparation of translation as possible on their own, as we will not be able to translate every line together: the point of these sessions is to trouble-shoot and talk through difficult/interesting points of grammar and interpretation. See schedule of Latin text classes below, after the lectures).
Week 1 (i.e. for us, Week 2): Thinking about vulnerability, ancient and modern
Week 2 (i.e.3): The elegiac poet-lover: power and libido in Ovid’s Amores
Week 3 (i.e.4): Amores 3.7 and the creative-erotic potential of impotence
Week 4/5: Discordia and powerlessness: Horace’s penetrating Epodes (I)
Week 6: reading week
Week 7: Horace's penetrating Epodes (II); Satire’s bodies: Horace (I)
Week 8: Satire’s bodies (II)
Week 9: Phaedrus: fables and underdogs
Week 10: Phaedrus and Tiberius: servility, power, humiliation
Term 2 (Winter-Spring 2026)
Week 1: Vulnerable and invulnerable bodies: revision, expansion, re-orientation
Week 2: Stuffed bellies and bad tastes: Persius and the poem made flesh (I)
Week 3: Persius and the poem made flesh (II)
Week 4: Beyond tragic vulnerabilty: Seneca Thyestes (I)
Week 5: Beyond tragic vulnerability: Seneca Thyestes (II)
Week 7: The Stoic palestra: learning how to die in Seneca's Letters (I)
Week 8: Learning how to die in Seneca's Letters (II)
Week 9: Achilles' heel: masculinity and rape culture in Statius' Achilleid
Week 10: The mother's story: Statius' Achilleid
Q800 Text Classes: reading schedule
Term 1
Week 1: Introduction + Ov.Amores 2.7 (also read 2.8, at least in English)
Week 2: Amores 2.7/ 3.7
Week 3: Amores 3.7
Week 4: Horace Epodes 8
Week 5: Horace Epodes 12
Week 6: reading week
Week 7: Horace Satires 1.4 (set text = vv.1-85)
Week 8: Horace Satires 1.4
Week 9: Phaedrus, Prologue to Book 3
Week 10: Phaedrus Fabulae 2.5, App.10.
Term 2
Week 1: Introduction to Seneca Thyestes, and Thyestes 691-716
Week 2: Seneca Thyestes 717-884
Week 3: Seneca Thyestes 885-1113
Week 4: Seneca Ep.12
Week 5: Seneca Ep.24
Week 6: Reading week
Week 7: Statius Achilleid 126-296
Week 8: Statius Achilleid 297-466
Week 9: Statius Achilleid 467-618
Week 10: Statius Achilleid 619-877