Latin Poetry Podcast

4 Comments

•   Alex
  July 12th, 2009 at 9:54 pm

  Dear Chris- I listen regularly, really delightful stuff. I especially like that you take the time to sound out the meter. I have a request though: Do you think you could read the poems once with an exaggerated attention to meter? So that even a child could hear it. I actually have a suspicion that the poems were read in a way that really highlighted these rhythms. Of course, their ears were much more atuned to them also. So if you were to exaggerate it might make it clearer to me. Thanks!
  Alex

•   Alex
  July 12th, 2009 at 9:54 pm

  Dear Chris- I listen regularly, really delightful stuff. I especially like that you take the time to sound out the meter. I have a request though: Do you think you could read the poems once with an exaggerated attention to meter? So that even a child could hear it. I actually have a suspicion that the poems were read in a way that really highlighted these rhythms. Of course, their ears were much more atuned to them also. So if you were to exaggerate it might make it clearer to me. Thanks!
  Alex

•   francese
  July 22nd, 2009 at 9:01 am

  Thanks, I will give that a try next time, though I think that hammering too hard on the meter would sound as strange to a Roman ear as an English actor reading Shakespeare with exaggerated stress on the iambs would sound to us.

•   David Jenkins
  September 12th, 2009 at 1:18 pm

  Very enjoybable. The joke about Mercury may be a little more sinister than you think. There was a 19th century expression related to brothels about “A night with Venus, a lifetime with Mercury” due to the fact that Mercury was used to treat the symptoms of then incurable forms of VD. I know that Mercury has been used as medicine in the ancient world, so I can only guess that it was used for similar reasons back then.

  David Jenkins, ’93
  Classical Studies in Latin

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