While the network here at school is buggy, thanks to all the teachers making their last minute changes, saving files, changing grades, or otherwise taking up bandwidth to entertain their classes with online videos and internet radio, I’m having too much trouble trying to listen to the latest installment of In Our Time with Melvin Bragg.
But I look forward to listening later when I get some cardio in at the gym and work off the brownies and chocolate chip cookie cake that my students have forced upon me.
And I recommend that everyone give it a listen. In Our Time is consistently interesting, engaging, and informative, and this episode features Mary Beard, Catharine Edwards, and Duncan Kennedy on the Augustan Age. From the blurb:
When Julius Caesar’s will was read – earlier than intended – it contained gifts. Gardens were given to the Roman people, money was distributed. But the chief beneficiary was Caesar’s nephew, Octavius, whom he adopted as his son.
To be Caesar’s heir was a troubled and public legacy, but from it Octavius fashioned a position of power unparalleled before and, perhaps, since. He was the first Roman Emperor and he called himself Augustus.
His reign is called the Augustan Age – a time of strange connections between politics, peace, literature and creeping tyranny. It saw the rebuilding of Rome, the flowering of Virgil, Ovid and Horace and the slow but sure turning of the Roman Republic into the Roman Empire.
As I haven’t yet had a listen I’m only speculating, but I think that AP Latin teachers may find some interesting avenues to explore here when contemplating the recently announced syllabus change, which will combine Caesar and Vergil.
I think the most vocal teachers, who have been complaining loudly and monotonously about the content of Caesar, calling up the ancient ghosts of Caesar courses past, have not thought creatively enough. Caesar and Vergil provide far more than literary texts, standing at the juncture between Republic and Empire, and exemplifying in various and controversial ways the role of literature in society, the creation, definition, and promotion of national identity, and so much more. Instead of reading Vergil as a poet contemplating Homer, we’re encouraged to read Vergil in a world shaped by Caesar and Augustus. Instead of spending so much time on (often questionable) literary devices, we can give serious time and thought to the pessimistic and optimistic readings of Vergil, and to the nature of art under dictatorships, which is always deeply troubling.
It’s precisely this historical and cultural context that will make the course such a blast. I look forward to it.