Pantheon Poets – www.pantheonpoets.com – is a new website – launched in June – where I post Latin poetry in the original. For each piece, the site shows the text with a parallel translation that aims to stay close, but not so close as to garble the English. The translations make no claim to be poetry in themselves!
There is a recording of each text being read aloud, which for me is the heart of the project. When I learned to recite, the tendency was to let metre predominate, but I have tried (after the currently preferred fashion) to observe normal word stress while attending to metrical quantity.
Content
The site is growing – there are forty-odd classical pieces to date and I post a new poem every week or so – and so far it concentrates on the period from Catullus to Ovid. Each new poem is accompanied by an illustration, which I post on the ‘Pantheon Poets’ Instagram account: on the site itself, the illustrations appear on the blog feed.
Each poem has a short introduction, and the site also includes short summaries of the historical background to the Principate and of the life of each poet.
Of the Aeneid, I have posted extracts from Books 1 – 4, majoring on the fall of Troy and Dido and Aeneas: as examples, you can find the Death of Priam here, and the ill-fated hunt and marriage of Dido and Aeneas here. I see Books 2, 4, 6 and (to a lesser extent 12) as those of greatest interest; I will also add examples from the Georgics and Eclogues as time goes on.
For Catullus, I will cover more love lyrics and one or two of the funnier scatological pieces. For Horace, personal preference would keep me very happily to the Odes, but I am prepared to go wider! For Ovid, I will cover more of the Metamorphoses and elegies and add some of the exile poetry. Propertius is hard to abridge and often a bit long to post in full – but he is a special favourite of mine and I will include more of the Cynthia poems, eventually even her apparent death and hilarious resurrection in Book 4.
Aims and target audiences
Most people looking for information about what Latin poetry sounds like will be current or former classics students. I want Pantheon Poets to meet their needs, and I’m pleased to say the Classical Association’s Teaching Board has added it to the Association’s list of approved online teaching resources.
But I am also aiming at another audience whom I consider important and too frequently overlooked.
Few students of literature in English and other modern languages are likely to know Latin now, even though much of what they study was powerfully shaped by it. Modern translations of Latin poets, whether literal or literary, can give only a very incomplete impression of their sound and prosody, and so too the very compressed, atmospheric and profoundly un-English effects that Latin allows. Pantheon Poets aims to help fill this important gap by offering those with little Latin, or even none at all, a direct taste of the real thing.
I therefore hope that you will spread this resource amongst your English and modern languages colleagues. English, French and German material, much of it wearing its classical influence openly, is featured in a separate section of the site.
I am starting to link some of the more famous Latin poems to classic English translations by people like Pope, Chapman and Marlowe, and I will shortly be adding some samples of Schiller’s free version of Aeneid 2 and 4 in the original German to some Goethe extracts that are already on the site. There are sound recordings of the French and German material, read by native speakers.
Questions and suggestions
Thanks again for this opportunity to introduce Pantheon Poets to you. I want it to be as helpful as possible to you and your students, so please feel free to make observations and suggestions: I will consider them carefully, though I should mention that the site software limits my scope for making major changes in format. One question that occurs is whether it would be helpful to prioritise pieces in the current GCSE and A level syllabi – should that be the case, be sure to make contact with me!
age, dic Latinum, barbite, carmen!
Marcus Agrippa – johnfstoker@aol.com
