Catullus 85 Odi et amo. Quare id faciam, fortasse requiris. Nescio, sed fieri sentio et excrucior. C.H. Sisson (1967): I hate and I love. You may well ask, why I do so. I do not know, but I feel it and suffer. Horace Gregory (1956): I HATE and love. And if you ask […]
Health Benefits of Vaping: What You Need To Know A debate has been ongoing ever since vaping was introduced in the market. It might be that friends and family have their own opinions about this. Unfortunately, most of these opinions are based on myths and research and not based on evidence-based research. There is one […]
Discussion of long and short vowels and diphthongs, with special attention to apparent diphthongs that are actually two syllables.
Introduction to the concepts of prosody, scansion, stress accent and quantitative meters, with examples of scansion in English and Latin.
Quintus Serenus 1.87-99 ex vitio cerebri phrenesis furiosa movetur 87 amissasque refert frendens amentia vires, sive calens febris iactatos exedit artus sive meri gustus seu frigoris efficit aura. 90 convenit calidis pecudum pulmonibus apte tempora languentis medica redimire corona. inlotis etiam lanis suffire memento cerritum; saepe horrendi medicantur odores. non semper praesens dolor est sanabilis: […]
Horace Odes 1.3 Horace’s sending-off poem (or propempticon) for Vergil is written in a meter usually called the “Forth Asclepiad,” (though the terminology varies depending on which modern authority you check). It consists of a Glyconic line followed by an Asclepiad line. In this installment I discuss the poem briefly and describe its meter, give […]
It’s prose, not poetry, but I just finished recording the complete Life of St. Martin, Bishop of Tours (AD 316 or 317-397), written by Sulpicius Severus (ca. AD 363 – ca. 425). You can listen to the audio by clicking on the “media” tab at the right of each chapter on this site. The text […]
This is the second in a series dealing with Horace’s lyric meters. The previous installment covered Asclepiadeans. This one discusses the Sapphic stanza, so named because of its association with Sappho, the famous Greek lyric poet. Odes 1.2 is summarized as follows by Nisbet and Hubbard: God has sent enough ill-omened weather. We begin to be […]
Herewith a re-do of a poem I have done on an earlier podcast, this time with special attention to the meter. It is part of a series on Horace’s lyric meters. This installment focuses on a meter that scholars call variously Asclepiads, asclepiadeans, the First Asclepiad, and the Lesser Asclepiad. The name is given by […]
Phaedrus Fables 1.18 Nemo libenter recolit qui laesit locum. Instante partu mulier actis mensibus humi iacebat flebilis gemitus ciens. Vir est hortatus, corpus lecto reciperet, onus naturae melius quo deponeret. “Minime”, inquit, “illo posse confido loco malum finiri, quo conceptum est initio.” Phaedrus, Fables 1.18. Text: Giannina Solimano, ed. Fedro: Favole (n.p.: Garzanti, 1996) Francesco […]