Assignment for Mon. October 10/Wed. Oct. 12

• This week we’ll focus on roughly the first half of Book 2 of De oratore. Read in Latin 28-40; 77-98; 99-204, and rest of Bk. 2, up to 204, in English.

After some mopping up operations with Book 1 (if there any passages you read in Latin that you’d like to discuss or questions you’d like to address, bring them up on Monday), we’ll aim to translate 2.28-40 on Monday; and 77-98 and 99-204 on Wednesday...or some of that, anyway!

Ponderanda

Come ready to contribute your thoughts and observations on the following (and of course on any other issues you’d like to raise):

• Continue to be on the lookout for the ways in which acting creeps into this text. Might be useful to make a list...

• Apart from acting, other ‘professions’ or ‘arts’ are variously featured as well, and these should not be neglected. Especially important is poetry (given that Archias is a poet) and history. Book 2 is in fact often mined for its remarks on the nature of historical writing, and we’ll linger a bit over some of these.

• Speaking of which: why, when the subject turns to writing, does it specifically turn to writing history? Why don’t other writers (e.g., comic playwrights) get the same degree of attention? One might think they would, since....

• Humor is an important part of this text (and in fact is the focal point of part of the discussion toward the end of Book 2). Identify a couple of places in Book 2 that you think are funny, and be prepared to talk about what they contribute to the narrative.