Latin 421
Study Guide for Midterm Examination
Octpber 1, 2023

N.B.: the exam is Thursday, October 12

Part I (identifications): you will be asked to identify a specified number of terms with an informative short answer explaining the item’s relevance/significance for this course. [Part I = ca. 15% of total exam points]

The items are likely to come from this list:

Satyricōn
Neronian (literary) themes
hapax legomenon
panegyric
Priapus
Odysseus/Ulysses
prosimetrum
cacophony (in the Cena)
Graeca urbs
Encolpius
Fortunata
sermo plebeius


Trimalchio’s tomb
katabasis

Anti-Aeneid
fragmentation of bodies/body politic
bella . . . plus quam ciuilia
hyperbaton
sententia
hyperbole
paradox
apostrophe


golden line
ardens et concitatus et sententiis clarissimus

Stoicism
Cato the Younger
Marcia
Julia
Scaeva
Erichtho
monsters (in Lucan)
Cornelia

Part II: translation of prepared passages, i.e. the passages of Petronius and Lucan that we translated in class (see the website’s “News” page for a record of these). There will be some morphological and syntactic identifications. [Part II = ca. 75% of total exam points]

Part III: brief commentary on Latin passage(s); you will be asked to comment on selected passage(s) in Latin with a carefully organized short answer. [Part III = ca. 10% of total exam points] The answer format is as follows:

(1) identify the author and work;
(2) identify the speaker(s) of the passage (i.e. character(s) and/or the work’s narrator);
(3) briefly describe the context in which the passage occurs;
(4) write a carefully organized short answer commenting on the significance of the passage in light of (e.g.) the work’s themes, ideas, style, its characters, its (socio-)historical or literary significance, literary, poetic and/or rhetorical qualities (et al.).