I'm teaching vergil AP and was trying to use Ralph Johnson's idea of
the Aeneid as fiction not myth, that is, a quasi-novelistic questioning
of myth. My students wondered how Johnson relates to the rather heroic
(in all senses) interpretation of myth by the joseph campbell types. My
students take the Campbell approasch as rather Augustan (as Augustus is
understood by those who read his propaganda machine, as .P Zanker et al
do). On another note: I wonder what others who taught the Latin of Catullus 64 last year for the first time in Lat. Lit. think. I myself would much rather teach 64 in trans. read in Latin 63 (the Attis poem)--you could do the whole thing, and it's a much greater poem, virtuoso and ultimately drammatic; for me, 64 is a forced attempt to create a masterwork. I wonder if it's really finished; surely he would have edited out some of the redundant uses of cor? |