Classics 301B
Spring 2025
Exam #2 Key


Part I: 2 points each (40 points total)

1. C
2. G
3. T
4. L
5. A
6. Q
7. J
8. B
9. F
10. S
11. R
12. D
13. E
14. H
15. I
16. N
17. K
18. M
19. O
20. P

Part II: 8 points each (40 points total).

Octavian/Augustus: the heir of Julius Caesar; as the young Octavian, he emerged from the civil wars as the victorious warlord and Rome's first emperor once the Republic was permanently destroyed (hailed "Augustus" in 27 BCE), though he maintained a flimsy facade of constitutional government; Octavian/Augustus – via his minister of poetry, the patron Maecenas – a strong presence behind much of the poetry we read for this course unit, ranging from references to his brutal and murderous land confiscations in Eclogue 1 and Propertius, to the Aeneid, which complexly reflects and refracts Augustan propaganda.

Nisus & Euryalus: clearly marked as lovers by Vergil, with Euryalus reflecting the Greek pederastic ideal of youthful beauty at its brief moment of perfection; theirs is the most mutually passionate and devoted relationship in the epic, and their deeply emotional and eroticized deaths provoke the narrator to apostrophize the pair as worthy of immortalization in epic (hence the controverial appropriation of Aeneid 9 text for the 911 monument in New York City).

servitium amoris: "love's slavery"; a pervasive conceptual metaphor in elegiac poetry whereby the poet/lover figures himself as a slave to his love/beloved, a most striking social inversion for an elite male to affect in rigidly hierarchical and status-conscious Roman society; also a critical part of the elegiac poet's claims to surrendering all for love, including even his status, in figuring his beloved as his all-powerful master/mistress (and an inversion of traditioanl norms of gender).

Cynthia: the addressee/beloved of Propertius' elegies, and the first word of the opening poem in Propertius' corpus ("Cynthia's eyes first captured me" in our translation); not a real Roman name, but manufactured from Apollo's epithet Cyntheus, and so closely linking Cynthia with poetry itself; Propertius obsessively creates a vivid and complex picture of his poetic mistress, and even ventriloquizes her in some poems.

Sulpicia: a rare example of a (traditional gender role defying) female Latin author, niece of the patron Messala; she wrote six short elegies that survive with the poems of Tibullus, who also was in Messala's circle of poets. Her poems describe a relationship with a lover given the name Cerinthus ("bee-bread"), which she describes as sometimes tempestuous as she boldly publicizes her passion in terms also found in the male elegists.

Camilla: the Aeneid's sole female warrior, to whom Vergil devotes much of book 11 in an epyllion or "mini-epic" that includes a striking flashback to her pastoral upbringing; a formidable warrior on the Amazon model, and virgin favorite of Diana (who relates her back-story to Opis in Aeneid 11), Camilla's desire for asexuality reaches its crisis-point when her pursuit of the eunuch priest Chloreus leads to a tragic and eroticized death by Arruns' spear (she "flees to the shades" like Turnus).

Dido: leader/queen of Phoenician colonists who settle in Carthage after her husband is murdered by her brother Pygmalion. Dido's settlement is flourishing until she empathetically welcomes the Trojan survivors of the Aeneid's opening storm and begins a relationship with Aeneas, after struggling with her aspiration to remain faithful to Sychaeus' memory as an univira. Aeneid 4 is focused on Dido's tragedy, largely modelled on that of the Greek hero Ajax, which is set in motion once she realizes Aeneas is leaving her. In Heroides 7, Ovid further develops Dido as a quasi-elegiac lover and offers critical readings of Aeneid 4.

Augustan teleology: historical teleology by hindsight fallaciously (a kind of extended post hoc ergo propter hoc fallacy) maintains that human history necessarily leads up to a momentous event, in this case the reign of Augustus figured as a refounding of Rome and "Golden Age"; in its most propagandistic moments, the Aeneid subscribes to this construct by using prophecies and other time-collapsing devices (see esp. the ekphrasis on Aeneas' shield) to represent Augustus' and Rome's rise to absolute power as divinely ordained, fated, and the like.

orientalism: the blatantly racist process of forging simplistic East/West cultural binaries; for Roman elite male identity formation this took the form of figuring easterners as weak, effeminite, lacking self-control and reason, and such, as is done crudely on the shield of Aeneas, where Vergil to his shame promotes Augustan revisionist history by portraying the civil war struggle for personal power between Octavian and Antony as one between Egypt and Rome, as well as a perilous clash between Eastern and Western Civilization.

militia amoris:"love's soldiering"; along with servitium amoris, a pervasive conceptual metaphor in elegiac poetry whereby the poet/lover figures himself as the equivalent of a soldier in his life or death commitment to his love/beloved. The choice to dedicate himself to love over the pursuit of state-service and military glory stands in stark contrast to expected social norms and traditional values of the Roman male elite.



Part III: 20 points each (80 points total).

Distribution of Points:
(1): 2 points
(2): 2 points
(3): 2 points
(4): 2 points
(5): 12 points

1. [Tibullus 1.1.41ff.]
(1) Tibullus,
(2) Elegies
(3) Tibullus/poem’s speaker
(4) in his opening programmatic poem, Tibullus defines his personal and poetic values
(5) some possible talking points for elaboration:

• expression of Tibullus’ typical themes (love, peace, security, rustic life), including the simple Epicurean life; Tibullus' surprising removal of decidely urban-set elegy to the country, as least in his imagination
• poet's stated aversion to values of traditional Roman elite male culture, especially the pursuit of wealth and military accolades; he instead is devoted to his mistress, to whose beauty he is “captive” (servitium amoris)
• the elaborate quasi-priamel ("What I want, Delia, isn’t praise but you") and Tibullus' often confused setting: is he in the country or in the city merely dreaming of the country?

2. [Vergil, Aeneid 4.397ff.]
(1) Vergil
(2) Aeneid
(3) Vergil/narrator
(4) the narrator describes Dido's reaction to watching the Trojans prepare to depart from her citadel/tower
(5) some possible talking points for elaboration:

• the passage as a model specimen of Vergil's "subjective style", esp. the highly emotional focalization of Dido's viewpoint as she watches the Trojans on the shore, high above them and isolated in her tower
• the narrator’s apostrophes, both to Dido and to Love personified, in keeping with the creation of overall sympathy for Dido as a tragic figure in Aeneid 4 – even if, in moralizing and historicizing terms, she stands in the way of Aeneas’ duty and destiny – and so another example of the Aeneid’s more complex "personal voice" surfacing
• the epic simile of the ants, working here in conjunction with the subjective style to capture Dido's psychological isolation: regardless of her turmoil and fear, the Trojans march forth as ants in cold, orderly (militaristic) procession, which further highlights Dido's alienation and promote sympathy for her tragic situation
  

3. [Ovid, Heroides 7.81ff.]
(1) Ovid
(2) Heroides
(3) Dido
(4) Dido supposes that she was blinded by love in not seeing Aeneas' treachery/deceptiveness in his account of Troy's fall
(5) some possible talking points for elaboration:

• as often in the poem, Ovid seizes upon a detail in the Aeneid to offer a critical reception of his predecessor, specifically the mysterious account of Creusa's disappearance in Aeneid 2 that has long troubled many readers
• Dido's realization perhaps alludes to the alternative tradition that represents Aeneas as the betrayor of Troy and so casts doubt on his reliability as a narrator in books 2-3 of the Aeneid
• Ovid's Dido's, while obviously angry (as a more elegiac lover than Vergil's Dido) at what she sees as Aeneas' betrayal of her, is also represented as critical of her own actions in Aeneid 4 and seems to be coming to terms with these in Ovid's poem
  

4. [Vergil, Aeneid 6.893ff.]
(1) Vergil
(2) Aeneid
(3)) Vergil/narrator
(4)) Aeneas and the Sibyl exit the underworld immediately after his encounter with Anchises
(5) some possible talking points for elaboration:

• at the poem's midpoint, Vergil has Aeneas exit through the visually more impressive, but deceptive gate of ivory, thus reassigning Penelope's personal and unambiguous dream about Odysseus' return to this marked historical moment in his epic
• does Vergil's choice reflect on what Anchises has just revealed to him, i.e. the parade of glorious Romans waiting to be born – in what sense is this parade possibly "a lying vision"?
• does Vergil's sending Aeneas through this deceptive gate somehow look forward to the second half of the Aeneid with skepticism? Does it possibly reflect on the Romans' larger "civilizing" mission in the world (as this was figured this in political and ideological terms, by Augustus and others in power), as this has just been revealed to Aeneas by his father?

5. [Propertius 2.13.17ff.]
(1) Propertius
(2) Elegies
(3) Propertius/poem’s speaker
(4) as he reflects on his love and love poetry, the elegiac speaker imagines his death
(5) some possible talking points for elaboration:

• Propertius' running obsession with death and memorialization (i.e. of himself, his mistress, and his poetry = his three books for Persephone)
• the poem continues Propertius' animus toward traditional patriarchy and Roman constructs of elite male gender (see esp. the details of his simple funeral) in the service of love
• the poet's proposed epitaph highlights his "unmanly" (to conventional elite thinking) slavery to love and offers a surprising gendered twist on a woman's being univira (i.e. devoted to one man)

6. [Ovid, Amores 2.18.1ff.]
(1) Ovid
(2) Amores
(3) Ovid/poem’s speaker, Corinna
(4) Ovid explains to epic poet/friend Macer why he is not yet ready to write epic (such as Homer's Iliad)
(5) some possible talking points for elaboration:

• the poem offers a clever and playful variation of a recusatio to write epic – Cupid, not Apollo, directs the poet's choice here, and so with specific relevance to the Amores
• Ovid's typically flippant – love clearly is not a matter of life/death for him – attitude toward his elegiac mistress, who here is explicitly equated with elegiac poetry itself, i.e. a (meta)poetic construct
• the playful intertextual punning reference ("Arms and the Man . . . woman's arms") to the beginning of Vergil's Aeneid – cf. militia amoris/"the soldiery of love" topos in the elegists, here also at play in the clever recusatio and re-commitment to elegy

7. [Vergil, Aeneid 12.926ff.]
(1) Vergil
(2) Aeneid
(3) Vergil/poem’s speaker, Turnus, Aeneas
(4) the final scene of the epic, in which Aeneas kills Turnus
(5) some possible talking points for elaboration:

• Aeneas' powerful struggle with a moral (and ideological) challenge: cf. Anchises' underworld instruction "to spare the conquered" (clementia) in Aeneid 6 against Aeneas' desire for personal revenge on behalf of Pallas
• the significance of the belt of Pallas, with its engraving of the Danaids on their doomed wedding night, in which they kill their young husbands? (possible specific relevance to Pallas? Turnus? Aeneas?)
• how does this ambiguous and complex ending shade our overall interpretation of the national epic of Rome and its promotion of Augustan teleology, Roman imperial ("civilizing") destiny et al., as well as the poem's status as a "reconstruction text" aimed at overcoming the cultural traumas of the civil wars?
  

8. [Sulpicia 3.13.1ff.]
(1) Sulpicia
(2) Elegies
(3) Sulpicia/poem’s speaker
(4) this apparently is the opening programmatic poem of Sulpicia’s elegies
(5) some possible talking points for elaboration:

• Sulpicia's self-awareness of her unusual status as a female elegiac poet, here allied with the Muses and Venus (as the male elegiac poets claim)
• her liberating claim to write for a specific – female – audience that has not experienced the joys of elegiac love as she has
• as central to her poetic program, Sulpicia boldly flouts traditional gender expectations that demand her silence, instead rejecting discretion and boldly embracing any infamy that may attach to her affair and poetry

The exam was worth 160 Total Points. Scores were recorded in D2L as a percentage. The class median was 90.5, the average 84.