Detailed Assignment for Week 7 (12-16 Feb.)

NB: Your next 'translation assignment' is a sight passage (chosen from the parts you've been reading in Woodman's translation).  This will be available to you starting Monday, 2/12 and is due on Tuesday, 2/20 by 11 PM (so again, you'll have a long time to complete it).  Format will be identical to the last one, except, of course, that the passages are 'sight' passages.  

Read

☞Book 15.1-22 (Woodman); 23 (Latin); 24-32 (Woodman); 33-37 (Latin)

Praeparanda

We're going to do a little something different this week.  You'll work in pairs as assigned below; and each pair will be responsible for the assigned Latin.  Specifically: you'll be asked to translate and also to be ready to answer/explicate any grammatical questions I or your colleagues might have pertaining to your assigned passage (if you've not yet cracked open Furneaux, maybe this would be a good opportunity to do so).  While I'll give you ca. 10 minutes or so on Monday to confabulate on your assigned section, you should as usual prepare the passage in advance and then be prepared simply to go over it with your partner. You may decide on who will do the translating/answering, or split the responsibility up among yourselves....however you wish.  Please note that this does not relieve you of the responsibility of reading the rest of the assigned Latin!

Maddie & Mae: 23.1-3

Anna & Liam: 23.4-33 (as in: 23.4 & 33)

A.M. & Guy: 34

Dai & Beck: 35-36.1

Suh Young & Cat: 36.2-4

Jonathan & Caden: 37

Ponderanda

This week we move into Book 15, the last complete book of the Annals and covering the years 62-65.  You'll notice that the amount of Latin I'm having you read this week is small (if it happens that we get through all of this early, we'll make a start on next week's assigned reading), and is confined largely to the short section that leads up to the main event in Book 15, the great fire of 64 (which we'll be reading next week).  Apart from 15.23 (which deals with Poppaea), 33-37 describes a notorious episode (well discussed by Woodman: see below) that seems to signal that Nero is nearing rock-bottom.  

To ponder, then: Given the great destruction (and the building of the Domus Aurea) and the conspiracy of Piso that are to follow, in what ways does 15.33-37 seem an appropriate 'set-up' for these future events? How, that is, does what's described in these chapters foreshadow events in the remainder of this book?   

Legenda ad libitum (but less ad libitum than usual)

This week -- and next, as well -- I'm going to suggest here that you read something by Tony (A.J.) Woodman, in many ways the most accomplished and important Tacitean scholar in the world. He has published extensively on Tacitus throughout his career (and in addition, of course, translating the Annals, as you well know).  He wrote two especially perceptive articles on this week's (and next week's) reading.  If you read NO other secondary scholarship on Tacitus this quarter, I encourage you to read one or both of the two pieces I'll recommend.  The first is (click on title for a pdf):

A.J. Woodman, 'Nero's Alien Capital: Tacitus as Paradoxographer (Annals 15.36-37),' in Tacitus Reviewed, pp. 168-89 (Oxford 1998).  Download A.J. Woodman, 'Nero's Alien Capital: Tacitus as Paradoxographer (Annals 15.36-37),' in Tacitus Reviewed, pp. 168-89 (Oxford 1998). 

NB: Tacitus Reviewed is a collection of previously published pieces.  This one first appeared in T. Woodman and J. Powell, edd., Creative Imitation and Latin Literature (CUP 1992) 173-88, 251-55.