Poetry
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LATIN POETRY

             Over the last two years, you have studied Latin and Roman culture.  But no one has yet asked, "How do we know about all this?"  A lot of what we know comes from ancient writers - some may be familiar to you, while others you may probably never know about.  Somehow, some of these writings were preserved for hundreds, even thousands, of years.  We can learn a lot about the Romans by reading and studying what these people wrote.  We can read about what they thought, how they felt, what they saw, who they liked, who they disliked, and what they did.  As you know, only the wealthier Romans attended schools and learned to read and write, so all the writings reveal their point of view or bias.  And since the vast majority of Romans were poor, we may never know what it was like to be a common, everyday Roman who lived for each moment and worked for a living.  For many centuries, our understanding of Roman life was not complete because historians and scholars felt that all Romans lived the same way the wealthy did.  Their point of view was the only one that we had to study.   This does not make their writings less valuable, it just means that we have to read between the lines to really understand what was going on.  And, in even the most well respected and scholarly Latin works, we have to keep in mind that Romans were real, thinking and feeling people  They were not broken statues, buildings in the dirt, mosaics buried in ruins, or plaster casts from Pompeii.  They were real people just like we are.

            There are several Latin authors whose work has influenced artists, scholars, poets, and political leaders for nearly two thousand years.  It is possible to read these authors in an English translation, but you would miss the true feel and sense of what the poets said.  Fortunately for us, we are able to read these poems and writings in Latin.  We will see firsthand why people choose to study Latin and ancient history. Perhaps we will even see how much modern civilization is rooted in ancient history and literature.

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