Latin 313 - Myth, Memory, and History: Writing the Past in the Roman Republic

Livy and Sallust, the best known historians of the Roman Republic, viewed history writing as a moral enterprise, presenting events from the past as exemplary tales to inform and enlighten the lives of their readers. Their narratives thus are highly rhetorical, combining myth, memory, and history to reconstruct the past. Close reading of selections from Livy's Ab Urbe Condita and/or Sallust's monographs--the Bellum Catilinae and Bellum Jugurthinum--will lead to discussions about how Romans viewed their past and how they wrote about it.

Prereq: Two courses in Latin at the 200-level or any 300-level Latin course.