If there were ever a Latin author perfectly suited for the college curriculum, Catullus is the gift from heaven. Though a wholesome selection is offered to high school students via Advanced Placement (AP; see Ancona and Hallett, this volume) and similar prescriptions, Catullus is on the whole a more adult author than can easily fit within the confines of the adolescent imagination. Teenagers are fascinated by his turbulent obsessions, but he wrote for adults, and his diversity is better suited to adult readers. Young readers can be misled, even disturbed, by Catullus’ well-planned coarseness of language and subject. Or they may be bored by what is neither outrageous nor pretty. Worse yet, they can be too inclined to view his poems as the unfiltered outpouring of an adolescent personality. They have been encouraged to understand that poets write about what they know and feel, and it will therefore seem obvious to them that the poems of Catullus are strictly autobiographical, impulsive, and unspoiled by literary convention. The average teenager will be impatient of the meticulous construction of lyrics that seem so natural, and will as a rule be bored by the literary construction of the libellus and its lyrics. Adolescent students will focus narrowly on the basic sentimental content of a Catullan lyric without having much interest in nuance. The few that do will, of course, be readier as mature readers to return to Catullus for a more articulated approach, and they will contribute much to college level discussions of whatever they have read before.
By college age, readers of Catullus will have a somewhat greater aptitude for the complexity of the Carmina, but as before they are pulled in two directions. On the one hand they are readier than ever to appreciate literary craft on a great variety of subjects, while on the other a great many will be interested chiefly in getting through a language requirement and maintaining the best possible grade point average in an academic term that is full of distractions.
The realistic teacher of college level introductions to Catullus will have to navigate these extremes. The more perfunctory members of a class will expect to replicate the high grades they were given in high school for memorizing translations, repeating
What they have heard about poetic artistry, and expressing their opinions about Catullus and his friends. Such students want to get Latin (and with it the need ever to deal with a foreign language) out of their way. Those who have not started Latin in a well-executed program will need to unlearn some bad habits acquired earlier. The cardinal bad habit is the thought that memorizing English translations is the main objective of any Latin course. Correlated to this are such pernicious assumptions as Latin is easy, Latin is a silent language, Latin is like English with a different vocabulary, etc. Some may be initially (or permanently) uncomfortable in a course that is not dumbed down to keep enrollments high and parents happy. These will miss the beloved teacher who had a proper respect for their self-esteem and the sanctity of their personal opinions.
The hardest part of every college Latin teacher’s task is to unteach the bad habits and crippling misconceptions acquired in earlier stages of Latin study. Not every student will be burdened with these handicaps. But the majority will, and the first things learned are always the hardest to unlearn. For many, the study of Catullus will entail a certain amount of wrecking and rebuilding.
These apparently cynical warnings grow out of nearly four decades of teaching Latin at a highly selective Midwestern university and paying attention to the remarks of my colleagues about the work of introducing students to college level study. Though AP is all about college level study, its good influence does not usually last into college.
Any college classroom, if it is to succeed with Catullus, needs to blend the mechanical bones and sinews of his Latin with the artistry in such a way that the relation will appear seamless. There is nothing that is merely mechanical and nothing that is pure artistry because the two are inseparable in great writing. The purpose of classroom work is to work toward that understanding.
It is a much-neglected truism that the object in any language course is to think in the target language. Though the objective with an ancient language is chiefly to read rather than speak, that does not nullify the general rule. Too many instructors, forgetting this, slide into the frame of mind where the objective is to translate. Though translation may be a good test of basic understanding, it can also interfere with the primary goal of familiarity and is likely, if misapplied, to retard the development of reading skill and understanding of the writer’s craft.
It is also well to keep in mind the commonplace of instruction in any language, living or dead, that memorization in the original language promotes familiarity on every level. This is particularly true when learning poetry, because meter is more an instinctual than an intellectual skill. In the hands of a real artist, meter reinforces the natural cadences of the language. The sound, rhythms, and tonality of Catullus can scarcely be learned without memorization. Undergraduates determined to pass their foreign language requirement with as little effort as possible will resent this. Though they will be willing to memorize ‘‘correct’’ translations of assigned poems before a test, other memorization tasks will not amuse them.
A few home truths about instruction in the college classroom follow. They began to evolve in my first job teaching Latin under close watch at Phillips Exeter Academy in 1959-60 and developed over the next 46 years. It is gratifying that so much of what I learned while teaching at the secondary level proved to be no less useful in the college classroom - certainly no less formative than college experience has been for the best high school teachers.
Class time for students at any level can best be treated as a workshop whose main business is the exchange of questions and answers. If possible, members of the class should provide the answers as well as the questions, starting with matters of syntax, idiom, meter, and other mechanics and over time working into rhetoric and other features of literary craft. With a few exceptions, students who are most involved with questions and answers will do best; those who don’t participate are the most likely to be in trouble early and often. College level education assumes that students are mature enough to be self-starting, but this does not come without prodding because of the habit of passivity. Every class needs frequent reminders that this is their class, not yours.
Assure your students that there are no bad questions: only bad answers. If one of them has a question that needs an answer, chances are there will be others who need an answer to the same question. Part of the classroom skill of any good instructor is to turn all questions into good questions leading to a useful and interesting answer.
Slack time, when all the questions seem to have been answered, is your time to ask questions. If you are sure the language is well understood, this is the time to introduce new points of poetic rhetoric, artistry, and whatever is available to enrich your classroom conversations with literary analysis. But meaning always comes first: never leave syntax out of the picture. Many of your students will have entered college with the delusion that syntactic structure is just for beginners and can be forgotten as soon as they move on to higher ground. You will soon become aware that a large number have, in fact, forgotten important parts of syntax and can’t read the Latin. Once you have begun to get some of the mechanics under control, pay attention to the formal structure of each poem studied. Catullus deploys his sentences into the cola or ‘‘limbs’’ of a poem, the section breaks on which his lyric is hinged. Considering what happens at the midpoint of a poem is one way to start. After you have taken your class through a few poems, they will be aware of the classic points of emphasis in lyric poetry, such as the first word and the last word, and the usual points of division. I have found it is useful at the beginning of every class to hand out a well-spaced printed copy of each poem to be discussed (if this requires more than one side of one sheet, you are probably assigning too much). Each student will then have a scratch sheet on which to draw lines of demarcation showing the main sections of a poem, make additional notes, and mark keywords. They will be surprised to see how orderly the layout turns out to be, even in what seem to be Catullus’ wildest effusions. Marking out the units of composition will drive home the point that Catullus reflected before he composed his lyrics and paid close attention to the formal aspects of his composition.
Handing out a printed copy of each poem at the beginning of every class will be your way of driving home the point that good workshops involve active learning and will produce notes, diagrams, and other graphical aide-memoires that can be used in review.
Some of your students will need to unlearn certain Romantic preconceptions, such as the notion that poetry is the sudden eruption of powerful emotions that seize control of the imagination and sometimes the pen itself. Your questions and answers should suggest that feeling may be the subject of a poem; it has on some level driven the poet, but emotion did not write the poem.
• Assignments should be short and intensive. Nobody is counting how many poems or lines you assign. It should become clear that unlike most courses, the assignment here is not to be read just once, but many times, to the point of memorization because the object is familiarity. Point out that your course has the shortest reading list on campus.
• Far from being a silent art form, lyric poetry has a performative, heard value that requires it be heard and spoken out loud as part of its reception. Whenever possible, Catullus’ lines should be sounded out as a necessary part of their understanding. The music of the words is part of their meaning. Classroom discussion of a poem is enriched when the teacher repeats the words and phrases in Catullus’ own language, remembering that the object of study is not a translation.
What follows will illustrate how attention to the basics can illuminate aspects of Catullus that may not come through in a published translation. Rather than a descent into the mere mechanics of meter, grammar, vocabulary, and discursive structure, attention to particulars is the only way to raise the poetry of Catullus above the banality of mere translation.
World History
