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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. |