Instr: Hector Tapia
One of the most traveled and cross-pollinated traditions of the ancient Mediterranean world is the fable. Functioning originally as an oral tradition, fables spoke to their audiences through anthropomorphic animals (or, at times, generic human characters), providing exempla, often negative, of human behavior. Without question, Aesopic fables were foundational to history, drama, philosophy, and democratic politics. This course will introduce you to the iridescent Aesopic tradition; in particular, we will read the fables composed by the fable-poet Phaedrus, a freedman in the household of the Emperor Augustus. With a zealous literary ambition, Phaedrus claimed to be the first poet to put fables in writing. Phaedrus left behind a corpus of several books containing about 120 fables in total, all of which were composed in iambic senarii, and his collection actually happens to be the first extant fable collection to have survived from the ancient Greek and Roman world. The goal of this course is not only to translate Latin verse poetry into English but also to feel confident in scanning and reciting iambic meter.
Prerequisite(s): LAT 100 (can be concurrent); or consent of instructor.
- General Education: Arts & Humanities (AH); World Cultures (WC); Writing Experience (WE).