At all levels of instruction Catullus is a major resource for teachers of Latin attempting to expose their students to ‘‘real’’ Latin from classical antiquity as soon as possible. Prompted in part, perhaps, by increased recognition of the potential value afforded by a reading approach to Latin language learning, they turn to Catullus for unadapted Latin, used either as a supplement to a traditional grammar/translation-based textbook or as additional support for a reading-based textbook.11 Lines and passages such as uiuamus, mea Lesbia, atque amemus (5.1), or cenabis bene, mi Fabulle, apud me/paucis, si tibi di fauent, diebus,/si tecum attuleris bonam atque magnam/cenam non sine candida puella (13.1-4), provide relatively easy Latin to translate. Memorable illustrations of the subjunctive mood, conditionals, vocatives, and ablatives, as well as opportunities for discussing love, Sappho, meters, friendship, rhetorical devices (e. g., litotes), and word order are found in the corpus. In addition, secondary school teachers eager to increase or maintain enrollments at higher levels of Latin may use such Catullan snippets to give their students a taste of what material awaits them further down the path of their Latin education.
Here in the United States, the days of a regimented Latin secondary school sequence - one year of beginning Latin, followed by Caesar in level 2, Cicero in level 3, and Vergil in level 4 - are over. During the 1960s, when that traditional curriculum still prevailed, study of Catullus typically followed those authors. For that reason, students like Hallett never encountered Catullus when studying Latin in secondary school. Today, secondary school teachers and many college teachers tend to spread the beginning stages of Latin study over a longer period of time. It is not unusual to spend two years covering the basics, a task that would have been allotted only one year in the past. What is more, the Latin authors studied after those initial stages now vary widely.
When secondary school students in the United States will first encounter extended reading of Catullus (if they ever do) is far less predictable than it once might have been. Depending on what elementary Latin textbook a student has used, he or she may or may not encounter some Catullus along the way, while teachers will differ as to whether they introduce Catullus to their lower level classes. Some teachers use Catullus, for example, in the third year of high school. Others do not have students read his poetry until they reach more advanced levels, as part of the AP Latin curriculum or the IB curriculum, or in advanced courses of their own design in situations where they are completely free to choose which poems to cover.
Certainly the most easily accessible and thoroughly documented study of Catullus at the secondary school level in the United States is that of the College Board AP Latin program.12 This program has now been in existence for half a century. The following short account is largely derived from the AP Latin page on the College
Board website (http//:apcentral. collegeboard. com). It recaps the highlights of the
Program’s history and shows how it has evolved since its inception.
• 1956: The first time that AP Latin exams were administered there were two, named ‘‘IV’’ (for fourth year Vergil) and ‘‘V’’ (for fifth year prose, comedy, and lyric).
• 1969: The Latin IV and Latin V exams were divided into four discrete exams: Latin Vergil, Latin lyric, Latin prose, and Latin comedy. Students could take one or two of these four exams.
• 1973: The exams were renamed ‘‘classics,’’ and only the Vergil and lyric options remained, with a common multiple-choice section.
• 1978: The exams’ title reverted to ‘‘Latin,’’ and the two exams became known as ‘‘Latin: Catullus and Horace’’ and ‘‘Latin: Vergil.’’
• 1994: The current form of the exams was introduced, with the options being ‘‘Latin: Vergil’’ and ‘‘Latin literature.’’ This latter exam is based on works of Catullus, Ovid, Cicero, and Horace.
From this brief history and from the materials Ronnie Ancona was able to study at the archives of the Educational Testing Service (ETS) in Princeton, New Jersey, we can trace the changing role of Catullus in the AP curriculum. What follows incorporates information from past Latin AP course description booklets - known as the ‘‘acorn books’’ from the symbol used on their covers - which are located in the ETS archives. ETS produces the AP exams in conjunction with the College Board and its AP program.
The names given to the original exams from 1956 indicate what Latin authors were being read and when they were being read in secondary school classrooms. At that time Vergil’s Aeneid was studied in the fourth year and the ‘‘other’’ authors in the fifth. While Catullus’ poetry was included from the start, it followed Vergil in the curriculum and shared a place on the level V syllabus with other authors and even other literary genres. The fact that students who scored a passing grade on the Latin IV Vergil exam initially earned only one semester of college placement credit, whereas a passing score on the Latin V exam covering Catullus’ poetry earned two semesters of credit, warrants emphasis. It indicates the canonical position formerly accorded to Vergil in the fourth year high school Latin classroom as well as the ‘‘higher’’ level of Latin achievement once associated with the study of Catullus.
The acorn booklet for 1966-8 still refers to the Latin exam that includes Catullus as ‘‘Latin V,’’ and requires students who take it to have already completed a course on Vergil. By 1969, though, each exam is described as ‘‘equated with approximately one semester's college work.'' So, too, students are allowed to take one or two of the Latin AP exams. The acorn booklet for 1969-70 no longer employs the titles ‘‘Latin IV’’ and ‘‘Latin V,’’ nor does it list a course on Vergil as a prerequisite for taking any other Latin AP exam. By 1969 ‘‘Latin Lyric’’ became a separate exam, featuring Catullus and Horace. Shortly thereafter, in 1973, ‘‘Vergil’’ and ‘‘Latin Lyric’’ became the only two AP options, leaving prose and comedy behind.
In 1994 prose returned, in the form of Cicero, and Catullus became the core of the ‘‘non-Vergil’’ AP exam, that is, the Latin literature examination, comprising the required half of the syllabus. Horace was switched to a Latin literature ‘‘option,’’ joining Cicero and the newly introduced Ovid as the author with whom teachers would pair Catullus. Today, secondary schools choose to offer either the Vergil or the Latin literature AP courses, or both. Their reasons for offering these courses are not based upon the students’ level of Latin proficiency, but on other factors: the preparation and interests of teachers themselves; curricular preferences of individual schools or school systems; perceptions about the relative ease or difficulty of specific courses. Some schools administer two different Latin AP exams in alternating years. Others give two different exams every year. Some always give one or the other. There is great variety.
The current AP Catullus syllabus consists of the following 42 poems or parts of poems: 1, 2, 3,4, 5, 7, 8,10, 11,12,13,14a, 22, 30, 31, 35, 36,40,43,44,45,46, 49, 50, 51, 60, 64 (lines 50-253), 65, 68 (lines 1-40), 69, 70, 72, 76, 77, 84, 85, 86, 87, 96, 101, 109, and 116. As one can see, they include polymetrics, selections from the long poems, and elegiacs. Particular poems on the syllabus are changed every few years, but the changes are usually minimal. Some teachers present the poems in the order listed above; some choose to group them by theme or other elements. Others choose to intersperse the reading of Catullus with the other AP Latin author option, e. g., reading some Horace one day and some Catullus the next. The poems chosen for the Catullus syllabus range fairly widely, including many of the best-known poems as well as some that are less popular. The themes of love, friendship, wit, poetics, politics, etc., that one would expect to see represented are all there.
Although the most obscene Catullan poems do not appear on the syllabus, the syllabus is by no means ‘‘tame.’’ Words denoting sexual behavior and bodily parts appear from time to time; sexual infidelity, of course, makes an appearance through the Lesbia poems; homoerotic desire is portrayed, as well, if one reads either poem 30 or 50 or both with attention to the language of love and desire. Whether intentionally or not, the syllabus does admittedly downplay the depiction of male-male amatory relationships in the Catullan corpus, but it cannot be said to avoid them completely.
Possibly the Test Development Committee has decided to steer clear of including poems which would prompt objections and might lead to a school’s decision to stop offering this AP Latin exam. Inasmuch as there are some schools in the United States where teachers are not even supposed to mention homosexuality, such a motivation would not be surprising. Other school environments, though, do not interfere at all with what material is taught, and how it is taught, in Latin classrooms. There, teachers are free to present Catullus in whatever ways they judge appropriate. When explicit sexual language does appear in poems on the syllabus - e. g., scortillum, irrumator, and cinaediorem in 10, ilia rumpens in 11 - teachers, textbooks, and students choose to handle, understand, and translate these terms with differing degrees of literalness and euphemism.
Many of us in the United States who have influenced current teaching of Catullus at the secondary level, either directly (by training teachers or writing high school textbooks) or indirectly (through scholarship), never studied him in high school. Hallett, who belongs in both categories, has already been mentioned. Ronnie Ancona, who has also trained teachers, written a textbook, and contributed to the scholarly literature, first encountered the poet in an advanced level Latin lyric poetry course at the University of Washington. Ancona, moreover, did not begin her study of Latin until after secondary school. Prior to taking the advanced course, she had, as an undergraduate at Grinnell College, read a few lines of Catullus in her introductory Latin textbook: Frederic Wheelock’s Latin: An Introductory Course Based on Ancient Authors (New York, 1956). Later she attended graduate level Catullus courses at both the University of Washington and Ohio State University. She recalls being enchanted by both Catullus and Horace when she met them in the Latin lyric course. The text used was Roman Lyric Poetry: Catullus and Horace, by A. G. McKay and D. M. Shepherd (New York, 1969), which arranges the poems thematically and puts the authors side by side. Periodically, Paul Pascal, professor of classics at the University of Washington, gave a much-needed mini-lecture on Latin sexual vocabulary, without which much of both Catullus and Martial would have been incomprehensible. This was in the days before the OLD (1982) was published and other resources, both print and internet, had made such information easily accessible (e. g., Adams 1982; Richlin 1992 [1st edn. 1983]).
Michael C. J. Putnam of Brown University, a path-breaking and influential Catul-lan scholar, recalls in a private communication:
I didn’t read any Catullus or Horace in school, and went to Harvard prepared to major in mathematics. Luckily, in the fall of 1950, I was steered into Latin 2a (Catullus and Horace) with Peter Elder - and the rest is history. Kenneth Reckford was in the class and I’m sure that Steele [Commager] was also. Peter was deeply involved with Catullus at the time (his splendid article on ‘‘Some Conscious and Subconscious Elements in the Poetry of Catullus’’ was published in 1951). I don’t think that, during those early months of my freshman year, it was the quality of the poets per se that got to me so much as the fact that I was at last learning how to ‘‘read’’ - discovering what figuration was, the meaning of metaphor, starting (very vaguely) to think about theory, etc. etc. Only later in the semester, and in the coming years, did I begin to appreciate the genius of the poets I was being taught. It was Peter’s doing as well as Cedric Whitman’s, as I have often said in public and in print. [Eric] Havelock was at Harvard, too, but he was doing more Greek than Latin. My dissertation was an attempt to bring the long poems, especially 64, into the conversation.13
While the backgrounds of Hallett, Ancona, and Putnam may or may not be the norm, it is clear that the way Catullus is taught today in the United States at the secondary school level is shaped, at least in part, by teachers and scholars whose own first approaches to Catullus postdate their high school years.14 There are positive and negative sides to this phenomenon. One negative aspect would be ignorance of how an adolescent might experience reading Catullus. But the positive side might involve raised expectations for a first encounter with the poems.
In the United States, today’s secondary school teachers bring much to their classrooms in addition to their familiarity with Catullus’ poetry. They have many teaching techniques and strategies at their disposal for making the learning process enjoyable and effective. Their theoretical and practical knowledge of adolescents affords them insight into the different kinds of responses that Catullus’ writing might elicit. They know their own particular students - and successful teaching, especially at the secondary school level, requires knowing how to reach a particular student population.
The following brief quotations illustrate the points just made. They come from a diverse group of secondary and college teachers: many of them responded to a questionnaire we circulated in spring 2005 on various electronic lists and in the British Classical Association Newsletter requesting information about their experiences with Catullus; others responded to requests from the authors in private correspondence. To judge from this correspondence as well as that informal survey, Latin teachers in secondary schools across the United States are introducing the poems of Catullus, or at least selections from particular poems, to secondary school students with apparent success. The same phenomenon obtains at the college level (see Garrison, this volume).
While Judith de Luce, a professor of classics at Miami University, has never taught at the secondary school level, her work as former chief reader for the AP Latin exam brought her into frequent contact with Latin teachers. She sums up adolescent students’ experience of studying Catullus, as reported by many high school teachers:
Teachers have commented on how appealing many of the Catullan poems are to their secondary school students who are themselves trying to understand relationships, how to form them, how to maintain them, what happens when they turn out to be less satisfying than they expected. The immediacy and vibrancy of the poetry certainly seem to appeal to these readers, as does the variety of the poems. And a longer poem like 64 is exciting reading in part because the narrative so pointedly asks them to consider this representation of the hero Theseus and the abandoned Ariadne.
John Sarkissian of Youngstown State University had also read AP Latin exams for many years before serving as chief reader. He observes that Catullus’ appeal is not merely to the ‘‘best’’ Latin students:
It is always satisfying in the grading process to encounter essays in which students display both sophistication in their analysis and facility in dealing with the Latin text.... Even students who have difficulty organizing effective essays or whose control of the Latin texts is limited often give evidence of having been affected by their exposure to Catullus.
Of course, it is the affair with Lesbia to which students most often respond.... [Students] often set a poem or passage into the context of the entire Lesbia cycle and inject some remarks which go beyond the analysis of the specific passage in front of them. There is no consensus on the relationship with Lesbia and the degree of sympathy students feel for Catullus ranges from excessive to non-existent. Some students recognize the validity, or at least the plausibility, of his conflicting emotions - love, lust, jealousy, self-pity, etc. - while others are dismissive of him (the word ‘‘wimp’’ sometimes is used). What I want to emphasize here is that many of the students have read the Latin poems thoughtfully and open-mindedly.... Of course, some level of competence in Latin is necessary for students to enjoy the poems and to make sense out of them. But it is by no means only the students who record the highest scores who give evidence of having given serious thought to the content of the poems.
In furnishing her own pedagogical perspective on why she teaches Catullus, and why she thinks her students like to read him, Nancy Wilson, a teacher at Decatur Central High School in Indiana who studied with Frank O. Copley at the University of Michigan, also emphasizes the emotional appeal of the poems as well as the aesthetic achievement:
I teach Catullus because his poetry is beautiful and extremely well structured... [T]een-agers relate more to him than to Caesar and his war battles and descriptions of terrain they’ve never seen.... [H]is poetry is so emotional and it allows us to see that these ancient Roman people we study were just like those of us today. They possessed jealousies, fear, hurt, and love. It makes them more real to the students. By reading Catullus we also get a chance to examine ourselves, our motives, our pains and sorrows - in other words, to examine our humanity.15
Irving Kizner, Latin teacher at the Spence School in New York City, specifies which Catullan poems his students have liked more than others. Adopting a long view shaped by his five decades in the Latin classroom, he reserves his reactions for the poems on the earlier AP Latin syllabus:
My thoughts about teaching Catullus to high school students, and most recently only to female students, are probably in line with most high school teachers.... Generally speaking, the love poems (male and female) are looked forward to and the critical poems are accepted as being necessary. I find Catullus a pleasure to teach and I am no longer inhibited by discussions about erotic (within bounds) topics.16
Barbara Ellis, who teaches Latin and Greek at the Fieldston School in New York City, introduces Catullus to her secondary school students during the year immediately following the completion of elementary-level Latin, rather than as part of an AP curriculum. In approaching Catullus’ poetry with them, she looks to her own experiences as a graduate student, and also contemplates changes in her selection of poems in view of evolving social attitudes:
I did study Catullus in graduate school [at Columbia University]. We used the Merrill text. We read most of the short poems and long poems. Catullus was characterized as a witty, serious, somewhat iconoclastic poet.. .We teach the course in the 10th grade after the students have covered basic syntax. We do one semester of prose and one semester of Catullus’ poetry. I try to model my approach on Professor Commager’s [her instructor at Columbia], but I try to gear it, of course, to a secondary school level. I don’t have the students read any of the poems which involve homoerotic themes, but I’m beginning to think that I should include a few.
Marianthe Colakis, a teacher at the Covenant School in Charlottesville, Virginia, points out that students in an AP class who learned Latin from the popular Ecce Romani series, published by Prentice Hall, can build on a prior reading of Catullus. In choosing secondary scholarship on Catullus to share with students, she observes, teachers give careful consideration to how these readings might improve performances on the AP examination:
Ecce Romani II has a few selections... the dinner invitation to Fabullus [13], the poem at his brother’s grave [101], an excerpt from Poem 61 ... My approach to the poems is pretty similar to that of Steele Commager [her undergraduate professor]. He always gave you the impression that he was reading the Latin as a Roman would have - catching all the nuances of the language, but never over-interpreting. I have read other articles dealing with specific poems and I use them in accordance with how they fit with what AP examiners are likely to ask.
At Westlake High School in Austin, Texas, Jo Green teaches AP Catullus to students who would have met him already in another popular introductory Latin textbook:
I have always taught Catullus as part of the AP syllabus...I have taught vivamus, mea Lesbia and lugete in my third year class the last two years, We use the Cambridge Latin Course - and these poems appear in Stage 45 of the Unit 4 book.
Also using the Cambridge Latin Course (CLC), Karen Zeller of Homesource, a publicly funded private alternative school catering to the needs of home-schooling families in Eugene, Oregon, presents Catullus to classes at several levels:
In first and second year, I give kids exposure mainly to the ‘‘Vivamus, mea Lesbia’’ and to poem 46. Of course, there is a chapter and a half of Catullus in CLC Unit 4.
Amy Spagna, Latin teacher at Langley High School, McLean, Virginia, discusses how the ways in which she teaches Catullus change, depending on the level and type of class involved.
I have taught Catullus four times, either as part of a Latin III course designed to introduce students to poetry, or as part of the International Baccalaureate curriculum.. .With IB, I was limited to doing the Lesbia cycle as part of a topic titled ‘‘Love Poetry’’.... My approach is a hybrid of those used by my teachers and professors [at Patrick Henry High School in Ashland, Virginia, and Randolph Macon College] ...IB forced me to use an approach that encourages the students to think about what the words themselves really mean. I will not be happy to have to change that when I teach AP (anticipated in fall of 2006) - the students seem to get more out of it than having to spend the entire time translating and finding rhetorical devices.... Students are usually assigned a poem for homework, and spend some time the next class meeting correcting their translations of it, followed by more in-depth ‘‘thinking’’ and analytical questions, posed usually as the beginning of a writing task. With a Latin III class, I focus more on the mechanics of the Latin itself, as well as the students’ general comprehension of an authentic text, though the general approach is the same.
Thomas Hayes, Latin teacher at Ward Melville Senior High School in Long Island, New York, describes several ways in which he ‘‘pre-teaches’’ the AP Catullus curriculum in his lower-level classes.
Usually I teach the Catullus-Ovid selections...I start introducing the poems in first and second year so that by the time the kids get to the AP level they have already read (generally speaking) 1, 2, 3, 5 (memorized), 11 maybe, 12, 13, 22 maybe, 43,49, 50, 51 maybe, 84 and a sprinkling of the 2- and 4-line epigrams. They also memorize at least two poems a year. . . . We thus have had the opportunity to discuss poetic devices, etc. This ‘‘strung out’’ reading gives us some space in the AP year to look a bit more leisurely at the poems qua poems, rather than as lines that must be trudged through.
Virginia Latin teacher Lori Kissell discusses some ofthe differences she sees between male and female student reactions to Catullus. Her recollection of her own undergraduate days suggests that gender would appear to have affected her treatment of explicit sexual material in her classroom.
When I have an all female class (as I did last term) they seemed to be more sympathetic to his lovelorn poems, and when I have a mixed group or a predominantly male group, they seem to see him as a fool for putting up with Lesbia.... I don’t think that I talk more or less frankly about love or passion or sex with a single sex group than I do with a mixed group, but I remember (often being the only woman in my Latin classes) that some of my college classes either tried to shock me with discussion of an ‘‘obscene/explicit’’ passage, or would try to tone the discussion so far down as to exclude all sex or passion, as ‘‘there was a lady present.’’
Lauri Dabbieri, Amy Spagna’s colleague at Langley High School, captures perfectly how issues of obscenity and sexual explicitness in Catullus’ poetry are shaped by the pedagogical context in which they are encountered. The Catullus poem read in high school becomes a ‘‘different’’ poem in college once the euphemistic translation of the obscenity is abandoned.
I remember reading the Ameana poem in high school and translating the word ‘‘defu-tuta’’ as ‘‘exhausted.’’ I never thought twice about it. It seemed innocuous enough and the ‘‘racy’’ elements of Catullus were thoroughly played down. When I got to [the allfemale] Sweet Briar College, and we had the same poem and I translated the poem as I had remembered, with the same, tame definition, [my professor] Judith Evans-Grubbs responded, ‘‘Lauri, I never thought of you as a prude!’’ I didn’t understand what she was talking about. It was only after she explained what sort of exhaustion was implied in the words that I understood that I had read a very different Catullus in high school.
There are many Catulluses out there in secondary school classrooms. The Catullus that the authors of the present chapter would want others to see might be different from the choice of other teachers and scholars. Indeed, it is likely that there is not even one Catullus we would agree upon in all particulars. However, we would like to turn to some of the challenges in the areas of language and culture that teaching Catullus in the secondary classroom presents, whatever Catullus one presents.
As we have already seen, one reason that Catullus ‘‘works’’ so well at the secondary level is that students today can easily identify with him and his circumstances. But, as T. P. Wiseman emphasizes in his initial chapter ‘‘A World Not Ours’’ (Wiseman 1985: 1-14), Catullus’ world was not our world in many significant ways. In workshops and courses designed for teachers offering the AP Latin syllabus, Ancona and Hallett both recommend Wiseman’s discussion to counter the perception that Catullus is so ‘‘modern,’’ so ‘‘like’’ us and our students. Wiseman also provides a brief summary of Roman sexual mores, as well as the relevant ideas and vocabulary associated with Roman notions of‘‘hetero/homosexuality.’’ Enthusiastic but careful and conscientious teachers will ride the wave that their students’ identification with Catullus can create, and at the same time call attention to other aspects of Catullus’ poetry that make study of his work more historically accurate and literarily comprehensive.
In writing her own Catullus AP textbook, Ancona decided that she could not in good conscience give students the impression that the only love affair represented in the Catullan corpus had a woman as its object. On the other hand, from discussions with Latin teachers in what we call public schools (British ‘‘state’’ schools), she was aware that some school districts in more conservative parts of the United States might look askance at adopting a textbook that is in any way sexually explicit or refers to love between men. Yet her sense is that many AP Latin teachers welcome an approach to Catullus that allows high school students to view his poetry with the same sophisticated attitudes generally adopted by college students.
Admittedly, secondary school students are not college students. But a very persuasive argument to use with school boards, administrations, or parents who may find some of the Latin AP syllabus reading ‘‘objectionable’’ is that the AP requires college-level work. This appeal to the academically practical value of reading Catullus in an intellectually mature fashion - one that will enable students to obtain college credit or place out of lower level college courses - can work wonders!
The absence of, e. g., the Juventius poems from the AP curriculum makes it easy to avoid discussing male homoerotic relationships in the secondary school classroom, a situation which some might view as unfortunate, others as fortunate, still others as pragmatic. But a poem like 30, addressed to Alfenus, and added to the syllabus in 2004-5, allows for a discussion of this sort without necessitating it in the way that the Juventius poems would.17 In her textbook Ancona uses the presence of this poem in the revised AP curriculum to educate students further about the range of themes in Catullus’ work. Her paragraph introducing the poem points out some of its similarities to poem 76, where the love object is a woman. She then states: ‘‘Seeing these issues in the context of a male lover and beloved should remind the reader that Catullus wrote poems about men desiring men as well as men desiring women’’ (2004: 55). While some Catullan scholars regard poem 30 as more, some as less, erotic than other poems, its inclusion in the AP syllabus furnishes an ideal teaching opportunity.
The authors of this chapter would be quite surprised if Catullus’ important, programmatic poem 16 ever were to appear on the AP Latin syllabus. As we shall see, efforts to include it on a comparable list of required Catullan texts for British secondary school students in the 1980s met with significant resistance. Still, the central issues that poem 16 raises, about sexual and literary power, can be incorporated into the study of other Catullan poems by astute and creative teachers in whatever fashion they find appropriate.
As for Catullus’ use of sexually explicit and at times obscene language, it is present even on the AP syllabus. The days of being able to keep high school Latin students at the level of euphemism in their Catullan translations are over. Books, articles, and internet access make literal translations all too easy. While textbooks do vary in terms of how they handle explicit language, ultimately teachers and students, together or apart, will decide which kinds of translations are true to Catullus’ Latin and which are not. Why not engage in that translation enterprise together? After all, students will in this way learn not only about Latin and about Catullus, but, more generally, about the power of words.
World History
