This course was designed with two distinct but generally compatible goals in mind. It was planned to fulfill the formal requirements of the College Board’s Advanced Placement Latin Literature curriculum. Since the College Board has discontinued that exam, it is more or less a placeholder, but the curriculum they outlined was a good one, and I plan to continue to teach it for the foreseeable future. As a piece of the larger Scholars Online Latin sequence, it also attempts to balance the presentation of the Vergil course, giving (generally) fifth-year students a chance to stretch their capacities and broaden the range of their reading.
The College Board’s course definition required that the student read:
I chose to work with the Catullus and the Horace, because they are the two giants of Latin lyric poetry; other rationales could support different selections, but this should provide a rich literary experience on which students can build afterward.
It should be apparent that advanced study at this level requires diligence and regular application; the pace and the nature of the material require maturity and discipline, and a very firm grounding in Latin fundamentals. Students who have come through Latin IV are eligible to sign up for this course without further ado; I would like to verify, however, that any other student is ready. I believe that this is to everyone’s net benefit: it’s not a pleasant thing to find oneself suddenly overwhelmed in a course like this. There are few opportunities to find one’s footing after the course is in progress. If you have not come through Latin IV, please contact me before enrolling, and we can try to determine whether your preparation will hold up under the circumstances.