Introduction and Preface

This exercise notebook began as a series of loose fabulae and grammar exercises I gave students in my Latin 113 classes to supplement The Millionaire's Dinner Party by M. G. Balme. I have been teaching this course for ten years now, so these handouts have grown exponentially. I decided to organize them, add to them, and coordinate them with each chapter in Balme. You have the result on your screen, you lucky dogs.

Many of the grammar explanations and examples presently come from Latin for People (Latina pro Populo) by Alexander Humez and Nicholas Humez. By the end of this semester, I will have finished rewriting the explanations and will have chosen different examples.

Each chapter begins with exercises to help you learn and use the new vocabulary. These exercises start simple (for example, classifing words according to semantic categories), and become progressively more complicated (for example, etymologies and English-to-Latin composition).

After you have learned the vocabulary, the grammar points to be reviewed in that chapter are presented, with examples and exercises. Again, these exercises go from more simple (such as giving different forms of verbs) to more challenging (such as translation and composition). I have given the chapters and pages in the Oxford Latin Course textbooks and in Wheelock which can serve as a reference for the grammar reviewed in each chapter. In addition, I have coordinated each chapter with the software available in the Language Learning Center.

Having prepared the vocabulary and the grammar (if you study Latin long enough, you start to write strange English), we now need to prepare to read Petronius. This is done in two ways: first, I ask you questions designed to get you thinking about the ideas and themes of the chapter; secondly, I furnish some cultural background for the chapter's events. It is worth stressing that this kind of culture is not CULCHAH, like opera and Impressionist painting (I'm sorry if that's what you were hoping for!), but simply details about how people lived their lives in Petronius's time.

To give a better idea of what life was like, we will watch a video called Pompeii: The Daily Life of the Ancient Romans and discuss it. This video artistically recreates what many of the buildings in Pompeii may have looked like, and features two Pompeiian ghosts reminiscing about life before the eruption. At the end of the semester, we shall watch and discuss the film made by Fellini based on the Satyricon .

Keep in mind that this notebook is a work in progress. I will be very grateful for any feedback you would care to give me regarding what aspects of this booklet you found especially (un)helpful or errors that you find. So will my Latin students next year!

Glenda Warren Carl
August, 2001