A Close Translation of Demosthenes’ Letter 1.5-7
By Isaiah Weir
Around 324 BC, the city of Athens condemned Demosthenes, one of their greatest orators and statesmen, on charges of embezzlement and bribery. Forced into exile, he wrote several letters pleading his case but to no avail. However, after the death of Alexander the Great, Demosthenes, a lifelong enemy of Macedonian rule, wrote this letter, urging Athens toward political unity and a general uprising for the freedom of the Greeks…
Fables of Phaedrus, “The Dogs Sent Envoys to Jupiter”
By Dara Sánchez
Animal fables in ancient Rome were not viewed with high regard in comparison to other genres of literature. Yet Phaedrus, an alleged freeman of Augustus from the 1st century AD, does not allow these preconceived notions to deter his ambitions. In this feces-filled poem, Phaedrus describes to us an etiological myth that explains why dogs smell each other’s behinds. He mixes the sacred gods, Jupiter and Mercury, with the vulgarity of dogs and excrement, contrasting such different things, and playing on borderline absurdity…
Penelope’s Wait: A Translation of Ovid’s Heroides Book I Lines 1–50
By Erin Schott
Homer’s Iliad and Odyssey have endured for thousands of years because they tell stories still true to the human experience. The Iliad recounts the horrors of war and the egotism of those in power, while the Odyssey narrates an arduous homecoming to a place that is not the same as before…
Pericles’s Funeral Oration: A Partial Translation of The History of the Peloponnesian War 2.37-41
By Noah Apter
Pericles’s funeral oration comes down the centuries as one of the most difficult pieces of ancient Greek literature to properly translate. As classicists, it seems that Thucydides wishes to help us sharpen our teeth on his grammar. Why? It is in the nature of speeches to differ from narrative texts, the former tending to be “live” while narratives…
Revisiting Lofty Arches: the Transmigration of Souls in Aeneid 6
By Erin Schott
In the beginning, the inner spirit
nourishes the sky, lands, and liquid fields,
the shining globe of the moon and Titan’s stars…
The Burden of Snow on Struggling Trees
By Noah Apter
Do you see how Mount Soracte stands, pure white with deep snow, and how the struggling trees can no longer bear the burden of snow, and how the rivers have frozen over with biting frost? Ward away the cold by generously tossing…
Beyond Translation: The Benefits and Drawbacks of English-to-Latin Composition
By Lily Nesvold
In an advanced Latin course my senior year of high school, my teacher gave the class an assignment that was deceptively simple: to compose four “correct” lines of dactylic hexameter, a quest which would result in an automatic “A” for the trimester. Naturally, we were all very excited about the grading scale for the task. What we failed to recognize was how difficult it would be…
Virgil, Georgics 2.458-542
Translated by Sara Chopra
In this final passage of Book 2 of his Georgics, Virgil presents his reader with an ode to the farmer, extolling the virtues of country living. However, as much as these closing lines celebrate the joys of an agrarian lifestyle, they equally express the poet’s distaste for the corruption that has taken hold of his city, Rome…
Catullus 101
By Sara Albert
Catullus wrote this elegy while mourning the untimely death of his brother. Despite the fact that he wrote it so long ago, the raw emotion he expresses throughout the piece is timeless and universal. Any reader who has lost someone special to them knows how Catullus felt in the moments he describes…
Aeneid 4.173-188
By Ryan Cooper
Few would dispute that misinformation and the media are in a spotlight of attention right now, and I’ve often thought about Virgil’s depiction of Fama in Book IV of Aeneid, and just how closely related his image is to that of the rumors and misinformation of the current world…