Category — dear diary

First day of grad school! I had Latin prose composition, a reading class in the Latin novel, and a seminar class on Greek tragedy. Still waiting on German. What have I begun?!

I knew that the workload would be more, but, to be frank, I had no idea it would be this much. My comp class is the easiest in the beginning, but we will be building up to constructing Ciceronian paragraphs in a matter of weeks and are expected to “retranslate” a large portion of his Phillipics back into Latin from English in a few months. We will end the class with incredibly difficult passages of English, perhaps from authors such as Shakespeare and Dickens, and be asked to translate into Latin.

In my Latin novel class, we will be reading the Satyrica of Petronius (15 pages a week). In addition, in English we will be reading “Greek” novels and wading through a five-page bibliography. We will give oral reports and construct a commentary on a selected passage of the Satyrica with the aim of creating a suitable guide for second or third-year Latin undergraduates.

My Greek tragedy class is the hardest by far. We will trudge through 350 lines a week of some of the hardest Greek imaginable. We will scan (not the easy task it is in English), briefly discuss grammatical stumbling blocks, and be tested every 700 lines. In addition, we will be wring 25 page PUBLISHABLE papers, attacking a specific aspect of the work and using a modern European language source as a significant contribution (hence my Reading German class on Mondays). Each student will also lead a class, tackling both Greek linguistic issues and minute interpretive questions. In addition to this, we will read approximately fifty pages of scholarly journal articles per week.

Then, of course, I am expected to be making my way through the reading list. To stay on schedule, this semester I will read Cicero, Catullus, and Horace in Latin. In Greek, I will read Homer and Herodotus.

On Saturday nights, I might sleep.

On a personal note, the family is great, the house is wonderful, and we are so excitied for our friends who are expecting “new editions.” We miss you all.

After moving to a new state, buying a new house, and with Team Shea starting a new life, I decided that it was time for a new blog. My posts may be short, but I want this blog to serve a specific purpose. Instead of a lot of musings, I wanted to chronicle my first year as a grad student. Stay tuned.