Catullus and Cicero

(5 Credit Hours) · Undergraduate

The love-poet Catullus and the statesman, orator and philosopher Marcus Tullius Cicero were close contemporaries, but often display contrasting attitudes -- towards love and sex, youth and maturity, public and private life, and morality in general. This module will involve close reading of selections from Catullus' poetry and of Cicero's law-court speech Pro Caelio, both as literary works in their own right and as a window on the ideals and values of the Roman elite of the first century BC.