Hey my excellent followers, just came across this tumblr, and thought I’d spread it around!
Enjoy!
~Q
First comes Horace,
Then comes Homer,
Then comes a quickly written Classics paper.
~Q
Edit: Should have used just “B” or maybe “3” to fit the metrical scheme more precisely (original is 7 beats and mine is 8)
I have to write a 10 page paper examining 3 of Horace’s odes through a specific theme. I want to do mythological images and the portrayal of Augustus, but I’m not sure how to start a paper on that…
~Q
I’m finally realising why everyone bitches about 4th declension nouns. Why exactly it was deemed necessary to have the same form for seemingly all uses is beyond me.
A group of my friend’s high school friends came up for the weekend, and we all got drunk, which resulted in three of them playing bass, guitar, and the melodica in one room while I was sitting in the other by myself strumming on one guy’s ukulele trying to remember the beat of the Alcaic and Sapphic meters used in Horace.
~Quintus
We’ve been doing the letters of Pliny the younger in the Latin class, and I swear, he sucks more than Cicero. He may write shorter things, but he’s kind of a dick and a kill joy, and uses relatively complex grammar.
The Croc says: Again, not exactly Classics Croc, but still relevant (and someone submitted it! woo!) And true. The worst is translating a shit ton of Greek. Definitely the worst.
So in Greek the other day, when we were translating a passage that would be on the test, a kid in my class thought that γενου was a genative singular noun. However, we have not learned how to make verbs nouns yet, but we did just learn imperatives (γενου is the aorist 2nd person singlular middle imperative meaning “become”). So when he asked about this in class, my teacher laughed and said it sounded like a strangle little animal, something like an emu.
So in my Greek class, we’re translating part of Aristophanes’ The Birds, and this is the name for the “utopia” some of the characters are trying to get to. I kid you not, the literal translation of this is “Cloud-cuckooland.”
The book is called Courtesans and Fishcakes: The Consuming Passions of Classical Athens. I was browsing through the Ancient Greek sections that I had stumbled upon during work one day, and saw this, and was like “MUST READ NOW!” So I’m reading the interesting stuff, like about drinking and prostitutes.
I’m now using final sigmas and deltas in Latin, and sometimes mix Latin vocab with Greek vocab, although not to the same extent of two of my friends who are both Classics majors in the came classes with me.
I used “ακρασια” which is a weakness of the will when talking about Plato and Aristotle. I love taking notes in the source language.
