Roman Literature

From Vergil and Ovid to Cicero and the poets of the golden age: explore Roman Literature with tailor-made sessions.

What’s on offer

• Epic: read Vergil’s Aeneid and Ovid’s Metamorphoses in the original or in translation, and discover how Rome told the story of its own founding.
• Poetry: explore Catullus, Horace and the love elegists, Propertius, Tibullus and Ovid, and the wit, passion and polish of Roman verse.
• Prose and oratory: read the great masters of Roman prose, Cicero, Livy and Tacitus, and see how Roman power, politics and history were written down.
• Reading and translation: build confidence in reading and translating original Latin texts, at a pace that suits you, from your first lines to extended passages.
• Context and culture: understand the world behind the words: the emperors, myths and ideas that shaped each author and each text.

Aeneid

From the burning ruins of Troy to the founding of a new city by the Tiber, Vergil’s Aeneid is the great national epic of Rome: a poem that tells how a homeless refugee carried the future of his people across the sea and set in motion the destiny of the Roman Empire.

Composed by Publius Vergilius Maro in the reign of Augustus, the epic follows the Trojan hero Aeneas as he flees his fallen city, wanders across the Mediterranean and finally descends to the Underworld to learn the future greatness of Rome. Throughout the poem, duty, the devotion to gods, country and family that the Romans called pietas, is set against the claims of love, glory and personal feeling. When Aeneas must leave the Carthaginian queen Dido to pursue his destiny, and when he must kill his rival Turnus to secure a new home for his people, the cost of empire becomes the heart of the poem.

What we can explore together

• Reading the text: study the Aeneid in the original Latin or in translation, at whatever pace suits you.
• Story and structure: trace the epic’s twelve books, from the storm that drives Aeneas to Carthage to the final duel with Turnus.
• Characters and themes: Aeneas, Dido, Turnus and the gods, and the themes of fate, duty, love and the cost of founding an empire.
• Key ideas: explore pietas (duty), fatum (fate) and gloria (glory), the values at the heart of the poem.
• Literary context: the Aeneid as Rome’s answer to Homer, and its influence on Dante, Milton and beyond.

Metamorphoses

From the creation of the world to the deification of Julius Caesar, Ovid’s Metamorphoses is the great poem of change: a dazzling collection of over two hundred myths, all linked by the single thread of transformation.

Written by Publius Ovidius Naso in the reign of Augustus, the poem weaves together the most famous stories of Greek and Roman myth: Daphne turning into a laurel tree to escape Apollo, Narcissus wasting away at his own reflection, Arachne spun into a spider, and countless other men, women, gods and nymphs transformed into animals, plants and stars. Playful, witty and often unsettling, the Metamorphoses is at once a vast anthology of classical myth and a profound meditation on love, desire, power and the endless mutability of the world.

What we can explore together

• Reading the text: study the Metamorphoses in the original Latin or in translation, at whatever pace suits you.
• Story and structure: follow Ovid’s ambitious plan: fifteen books of myths arranged as one continuous poem, from the first chaos to Ovid’s own day.
• Characters and themes: the gods and their victims, and the themes of love, revenge, hubris and transformation.
• Myth and metamorphosis: explore how and why Ovid turns myth into poetry of change, and the science of the world he imagines.
• Literary context: the Metamorphoses as the great treasury of classical myth, and its enduring influence on art and literature from the Middle Ages to the present.