Class 19 M 11/17/25: The Colosseum

All right, so as promised, your quizzes are graded and back to you.

As well as your annotated bibliographies.

So those are all set.

A couple people.

I just added some comments to it.

Again, sources you might want to consider.

So now you have.

Today is a Monday and our last class, one, two, three weeks.

We have three weeks left, Five classes left.

So sad.

Until final exam and your final paper.

Okay, so if you have not started writing your paper, start writing your paper.

Okay.

Because the end of the semester is going to sneak up on you and you don't want to be worrying about writing a whole paper in a night.

Okay.

Maybe write bits and pieces of it.

And you also want to enjoy the end of the semester.

There's lots of fun stuff that happens at the end of the semester, and you don't want to be missing out on it because you're not managing your time.

Yeah.

Final exams in class.

Last class, December 8th.

Okay.

Yep.

It is focused midterm on.

But some of the multiple choice big.

Some of the stuff is like gonna incorporate.

You're gonna get your study guide before you go for Thanksgiving.

So you'll again, you'll know broad strokes, what to expect if you want to get going with your paper, if you've started it or even, you know, you just have a paragraph, you have a couple pages, whatever.

And you want me to take a look at it, I'm happy to.

That's part of what I'm here for, other than my dazzling personality.

Right.

We want to help you to make sure that you are successful in this class.

Again, I don't want it to be a gotcha.

Right.

Like, I'm not looking to hammer anyone on this.

I want to see what you were able to research, what argument you could put together, things that I am going to be looking for in your final paper as you are writing it.

Your final paper is not taking the disjointed paragraphs from your annotated bibliography, putting them in a row on a paper.

It's not a research paper.

Okay?

A research paper is constructing an argument and using quotes and citations from the various sources, either the ones that you used on your annotated bibliography or other ones and making sure you give credit to them.

Okay, so you want to integrate your quotation.

So don't.

My big pet peeve is dropping a quotation in a paragraph.

What does that mean?

Dropping a quotation in a paragraph?

Trace.

Not citing it.

Not so much.

Citing it, that is.

We're gonna talk about that.

Yeah.

Bless you.

Not explaining It, Yeah.

Not explaining it.

Not giving me context.

Okay, so if you're going to be making a point and you're going to quote something from an author, you're going to introduce it, you're going to introduce your idea, you're going to give the quotation and then you're going to explain it.

Okay?

Now I want you to think Nightmare before Christmas when you're using a citation.

Feels like a weird reference, but stay with me, right, Jack Skeleton.

Right.

He says, what is this?

What is this?

What is this?

Write that song.

Don't say I want.

That's what I'm going to be asking you.

What is this?

What is this quote telling me?

Don't tell me.

This shows blank.

What shows?

Okay, what from the quote shows?

Don't use the word this.

This is too ambiguous.

This, the author, this, his word choice.

This structure, this war, this piece of equipment, this road.

Tell me what this is.

Okay, so when you are writing a paper and you're giving a quote, what is this?

What is this?

What is this?

The reader should not question, what is this?

Okay, you're going to integrate it.

You're going to build your argument, give your quotation, your citation, you're going to cite it and then you're going to explain it.

How does it connect?

Okay.

A lot of times what I see my students do, you choose great quotations, you choose great pieces of evidence and you plop them in and you don't tell me anything about it.

Okay, I can make the connection.

Okay, I know what you're trying to say, but we want to move from me knowing what you're trying to say to you saying doesn't have to be perfect.

Again, I would much rather it be imperfect.

And you're writing then quote, unquote perfect and AI.

Okay, I'm not going to take off massive points if it's not perfect.

I'm going to take off points if what is this?

Is asked a number of times.

Okay, I'm going to take off points if there are no citations anywhere.

Okay.

Where you need to have in text citation.

And I'm going to take off points if you don't say anything.

Okay.

It's really easy not to say anything in a paper.

AI is great at saying nothing but using a lot of words.

Okay.

The hypotheticals.

Okay, tell me.

Make your argument and then explain it.

No one's.

If you do the paper, no one's failing the paper.

We have enough time that if it's really that bad, I would send it back to you and say you have four days.

Turn me in something better.

Okay, but I don't want it to get to that point.

I also don't want the panic to set in and we use AI and again, you're turning in something.

That's correct, but it's not yours.

I want to know what you've come up with this semester.

So three weeks.

You have three weeks.

If you start and you want.

Hey, I've written two pages.

I just want to make sure before I write anymore I'm on the right track.

Can you take a look?

Absolutely.

Send it to me.

Okay?

That's what I am here for.

Any questions on any of that?

Remember, what is this?

What is this?

Tell me what it is.

Tell me what your argument is.

Tell me how that piece of argument, support or piece of, or citation or quote supports your argument.

All right, now, with all the boring stuff out of the way, we can turn our attention to all the fun stuff that we have for tonight.

So we're going to finish up Roman Literature with one of my favorite Roman writers.

He's a bit controversial.

He's also who I did my master's thesis on.

So I know a lot of random information about Ovid.

So we're going to talk about them, and then we're going to turn to what everyone we have to think of If I say Roman, and the image normally in someone's head is the Colosseum, we're going to start looking at the gladiator games.

So our last unit here, we're ending out on Roman entertainment.

What did the Romans do to entertain themselves?

They went to the gladiator games.

They went to this chariot racing.

They went to the theater.

They went to the baths.

So we're going to look at those four forms of entertainment and then look at Pompeii as kind of the culminating, this frozen moment in time.

How does it pull everything together?

Okay, so that's what the next two and a half weeks have in store for us.

All right, so Ovid is considered the third great poet of the Augustan era.

Okay?

So remember, the golden age of literature is the period of Augustus, this first 50 years of the empire, when Augustus is ruling.

Okay?

And the three Augustan poets are Virgil, who we talked about with Aeneas, Horace, who is famous for his short epigram poems.

Everyone knows Horace, Carpe diem.

Sees the day, that is Horus.

Okay?

And Ovid, okay, Ovid's the youngest of the three, and this is important because socio, political, economic, always impacts art.

Okay?

So he's the youngest of the three.

So he doesn't remember the Civil wars the way Horace and Virgil do.

His view on Augustine, peace is a little bit different.

He has the luxury of safety to be able to be a little bit more pushing the boundaries.

How many of you have taken psych so far?

Right.

Maslow's hierarchy of needs.

Right.

You can't get to higher level thinking unless those basic needs are met.

These two living through civil war, it's greatly impacting their arc.

Their safety is constantly.

Okay.

Ovid's younger.

He has safety.

So he can.

He can take chances.

So Publius Oidius Naso, or Ovid.

As we know, he was born in 43 BCE in Solno, a town in the Apennine Mountains about 90 miles from Rome.

He was born into an equestrian or knightly family.

So he's not a politician.

His family is not a politician.

Again, that's going to also impact his writing.

Bless you.

Thank you.

And Ovid's father wanted him and his brother to reach that status, so he sent them to Rome during their childhood to be educated.

Ovid at first tries to please his father, and he tries writing prose, he tries becoming an orator, he tries becoming a lawyer.

And he kind of fails miserably at all of them.

And so he decides, you know what?

I'm just gonna be a poet.

I'm gonna be who I'm meant to be.

So he turns to his true passion, which is poetry.

So in Ovid's early life, he was a successful student, and he gets fame very quickly.

His first book of poetry is called the Amores.

What is amore or amore?

Love.

Yeah, love poetry.

And it's particularly, again, a little cheeky, a little pushing the limit.

It's basically poetry.

How to pick up girls or men.

He doesn't care who you're gonna pick up.

This is how you do it.

And so he gets pretty well known because of this.

And he is able to then turn to other types of poetry.

And he's going to start writing.

And he.

Because he becomes popular, he gets in with the elite, he becomes friends with the big players in the social class.

So he definitely knew Virgil.

He definitely knew Augustus's family.

We're gonna talk about that in a second.

And then he starts writing what's considered his magnum opus, his great work, which is the metamorphoses, like metamorphic rock or metamorphosis.

All the stories have some sort of change in them.

And he completes it in 8 CE.

The same thing that happens in 8 CE is that Ovid is exiled from Rome.

He's sent away by Caesar Augustus.

And we know there's some sort of conflict.

We don't know what it is.

It's one of the great historical mysteries.

And in one of his later writings, he writes that it was an error, not a crime.

It was an error, not a crime.

So we know he didn't kill anyone.

But we think, and we being classicist historians, think it has to do something with his Amoris.

Because the same year and the same month that Ovid is exiled, Caesar Augustus's granddaughter Julia is also exiled for adultery.

An error, not a crime.

Did she read his poetry?

And it's inspired, remember, Augustus wants back to those Roman values, right?

Back to the good old days.

And Ovid is too avant garde.

So he exiles Ovid, and he finishes his great work, the metamorphoses in 8 AD the same year he's exiled.

And he's exiled to this place called Thomas.

And Thomas is the farthest out you can go in the Roman Empire.

It's on the Black Sea.

It is as rural and back country as ancient times can get.

And about four people in Thomas speak Latin.

So think of the irony of this punishment, right?

He's sent to the farthest reaches of the Empire, to a place where, as a poet whose whole life is words, he can't communicate.

Okay?

So he's stuck out there.

And while he's stuck out there, he finishes his, probably his second most famous work, the Fasti, on the calendar, which is considered incomplete because it only gets to July or to June.

He doesn't do the second half of the year describing what goes on in each month.

Again, maybe that's purposeful, maybe the second half of the calendar is not actually lost.

But if the Julian family is the family that exiled you, why are you going to write about July and August?

To highlight there.

This was my whole thesis in college is the fasting.

So, okay, and then he writes what's called the Tristus, the sadness.

His sadness.

These are letters where he's writing to his friend, his brother and his wife, asking them to speak on his behalf, to bring him home, because he's so miserable out where no one's being flattened and everyone's backwards and he ultimately dies out there.

Okay?

So poor Ovid.

Life ends painfully and quietly because he can't talk to anyone out in exile.

So we are going to read, or you have read one story out of the Metamorphoses, which is thousands and thousands of lines, many, many stories.

But we're going to talk about probably the most famous story, and that is Daphne and Apollo.

So it's from the Metamorphoses transformations.

And many authors or many historians consider this a mock epic.

Okay?

A mock epic.

It's written in the meter of epic, that dactylic hexameter, long, short, short, long, short, short.

Okay?

But there's no hero.

There's no journey.

There's no central character.

Really, the genius of Ovid and the Metamorphoses is that, like, the poet narrator is the hero, and you move through, and he weaves all of these stories so you can read.

Many have read various stories pulled out from the Metamorphoses, but if you read it all together, it does kind of create this narrative tale.

Okay.

And it was his most famous work, and it is extremely influential in the Middle Ages and the Renaissance because it becomes inspiration for further poetry as well as many pieces of Renaissance art.

Now, why is Ovid kind of controversial?

Because many of the scenes in the Metamorphoses deal with sexual assault.

And in this age of questioning societal norms, there are people on both sides saying, why are we reading these stories of violence against women?

Okay.

And then there are other people who are arguing, we need to, because it's a fact of life and it gives.

Sometimes it's easier to talk about a topic when you're talking about it from a third party.

And then there's a school of thought that Ovid is using this violence as a metaphor of choice and voice, who is being silenced or censored or exiled by someone with power, the gods.

And in the.

In the Metamorphoses, most of the violence is committed by Jupiter and Apollo, the two gods that Augustus portrayed himself in literature and art.

So many historians believe that these stories are actually him sticking it to Augustus, saying, this is the problem with the government, people of power.

Taking away voice, taking away choice, taking away autonomy from the republic.

Right.

He didn't live through the civil wars.

He just knows he doesn't have the right to vote.

He is being exiled.

Right?

So there is this school of thought that it's being used in that way, and that, as you read it, he doesn't glorify the sexual violence that you are supposed to feel uncomfortable, that you're supposed to feel for the female victim.

So I'm on the side of.

I think it's important to read Ovid.

I think he is using it as a metaphor for censorship and exile and who.

Who in society has power and who is the powerless?

And how do those power dynamics mix?

I also Think it's important to read things that make us uncomfortable again, in a way that's not glorifying violence, but that it's a fact of life and that maybe in reading these stories, people now have language with which to process and talk.

But there's a lot of great literature out there now, way more than when I was a student about kind of these.

These topics and issues.

So we are going to look at the story of Apollo and Daphne, and it's super famous.

How many people have heard the story of Apollo and Daphne before reading it Today or today?

1.

You've all heard of it because you didn't know it.

Because what do Olympic athletes get put on their head when they win a gold medal?

When you win a gold medal, what do you get when they're standing up there?

The thing that the laurel leaves.

The Daphne leaves.

Daphne is the word for laurel.

And Greek and Latin.

This is the story of why Apollo is known for that crown, just like emperors would have the laurel.

So those symbols that we're always used to seeing with Romans, the crown of leaves, have to do with this story.

So we all know the story.

We just didn't know we knew the story.

And again, it's an extremely famous story because so many Renaissance and medieval painters and sculptors use it for inspiration.

So here is a painting of Apollo and Daphne.

The most famous and my favorite sculpture of the story is Bernini in the Villa Borghese in Rome.

And again, this is in the Renaissance.

This is peak Renaissance art.

Okay, a lot of signatures of Bernini here, but it's a piece that's meant to be viewed in the 360.

So when you walk around the statue, your perspective changes and you go from seeing people to seeing a tree.

So it's like an optical illusion.

So just like the story, which I love, another famous one from the Middle ages, from the 1400s in the National Gallery in London, this one in the National Gallery of art in Washington, D.C. apollo pursuing Daphne often.

You'll see, again, Apollo.

He has the sun behind him.

We talked about that halo look.

And normally Daphne's father is a river God.

You're not going to paint a whole river in a picture.

So.

So normally, to symbolize that in art, you'll see a vase tipped over with water spilling out.

And that's to let the audience know he's some sort of water God.

Then we have Cupid back here hanging out because he plays a major role in this story.

And then here's Daphne turning into a tree.

And finally, in the Louvre this was not stolen from the Louvre.

Okay?

Just the jewels by Poussin.

Famous painting of Apollo and Daphne.

Again, here's that image.

Water pouring out of a vase lets us know if he's a river God.

Okay, here's Cupid, here's his bow.

All of these symbols.

All right, so before we talk together as a group, I'd like for you, with the people around you, what's the tone of the story?

How is Daphne portrayed?

How is Apollo portrayed?

What imagery is being used to create tension?

What do we think of Apollo's making the laurel tree touching or creepy?

What's your response?

And would the Romans view it the same way?

And what further insight might we have as a more modern audience?

So pick one or two of these to talk with those around you, and then we'll share out together.

Ready, set, go.

Yeah.

So even before that.

Yes, That's.

That's.

No, that's the.

That is the crux of the story.

Show how many people read the story.

Because if we didn't, then it just.

It's not gonna be as fun.

Oh, guys.

All right, we're gonna read it, okay?

Because it creates tension in this moment and this vignette, okay?

So I'm going to read it out to you as I'm reading.

I want you to think about, what's the tone?

What does tone mean?

Yeah.

How is how the audience maybe not supposed, but how the audience feels?

What's the vibe?

Vibe check.

Okay.

How is she portrayed in this story?

And how is Apollo portrayed?

Now, if we were in a literature class, I would ask you to write down the diction, the words that stand out to you.

How does Ovid create this tone?

What words, what phrases, what imagery does he do to portray them for it to create this tone, this vibe, how does he create tension?

So any good story needs to have a conflict.

Okay?

We're gonna have a couple conflicts going on here.

The main one, as Samia pointed out, is Apollo's gonna fall in love with Daphne and she wants nothing to do with him.

That's gonna be our main conflict in this story.

We know it's from the Metamorphoses.

There's gonna be a transformation.

If you didn't know before, she's transformed into a laurel tree.

Okay?

And Apollo is going to make the laurel tree sacred to him.

And Olympic athletes and conquering generals will be crowned in laurel as a symbol of his.

This story with Daphne.

Okay.

All right.

Are we ready?

This is like story times.

Crisscross applesauce.

You get to see it.

You get to listen.

Okay, here we go.

Okay.

Now, Daphne, daughter of the river God Peneus, was the first of Phoebus's.

Apollo's love.

This love was not the fruit of random chance.

What fostered it was Cupid's cruel wrath.

For now.

While Apollo was still taking pride in the defeat of the python, he caught sight of Cupid as he bent his bow to tie the string at two ends.

And he said, silly boy, what are you doing with that heavy bow?

My shoulders surely are more fit for it, for I can strike wild beasts.

I never miss.

I can strike.

I never miss.

I can defeat enemies.

Just recently, I even hit.

My shafts were infinite with the swollen serpent, the python spalled across whole acres with his pestilent paunch.

Be glad your torch can spark a bit of love.

Don't try to vie with Me for the praise and the wreaths.

And Cupid's son replied, your arrows may pierce all things, O Apollo, but you'll be transfixed by mine.

And even as all earthly things can never equal any deity, so shall your glory be no match for mine.

That he said.

He hurried off.

He beat his wings until he reached Parnassus, Shady Peak.

Parnassus is just a mountain in Greece.

There, from his quiver, Cupid drew two arrows of opposite effect.

The first rejects, the second kindles love.

This last is golden, its tip is sharp and glittering.

The first is blunt, its tip is leaden.

And with this blunt shaft the God pierced Daphne.

With the tip of gold he hit Apollo, and the arrow pierced the bones and marrow.

And at once the God of Delos is aflame with love.

But Daphne hates its very name.

She wants deep woods and spoils of animals she hunts.

It is Diana, Apollo's virgin sister, whom she would like to emulate.

Around her hair in disarray, she wears a simple headband.

Though many suitors seek her, she spurns, rejects all she wants to roam uncurved, she needs no man.

She pays no heed to marriage, love or husbands.

Her father often said, you are in my debt.

A son in law is owed to me.

And he said, you owe me grandsons, but his daughters as things quite criminal, the marriage torch and matrimony.

With a modest blush on her fair face, she twines her arms around her father's neck.

Allow me to enjoy perpetual virginity, she pleads.

Oh dear, dear father, surely you'll concede to me the gift Diana has received from her dear father.

And in fact Pentias would have agreed.

Daphne, it's your beauty that will prevent you getting that dear gift.

Your fair form contradicts your deepest wish.

Apollo is love struck having seen this girl.

He longs to wed her and in longing hopes.

But though he is the God of oracles, he reads the signs all wrong.

Even as when grain is harvest, the stubble left will burn, or as the hedges burn, when chance has led some traveler to persist his torch too close, or to forget it on the road when he went off at dawn.

So Apollo burns.

So, his heart aflame with hope, he feeds a fruitless love.

He looks at Daphne's hair as unadorned it hangs down her fair neck and says, just think if she should comb her locks.

He sees her lips and never tires of them.

Her fingers, hands and wrists are unsurpassed.

Her arms, more than half bare, cannot be matched.

Whatever he can't see, he can imagine.

He conjures it even more inviting, but swifter than the lightest breeze.

She flees and does not halt, not even when he pleads.

O daughter of Penia stays.

Dear Daphne, I don't pursue you as an enemy.

Wait, nymph.

You flee as would the lamb before the wolf, the deer before a lion, the trembling dove before the eagle.

Thus all flee from hostile things.

But it is love for which I seek you now.

What misery.

I fear you'll stumble, fall, be scratched by branches, palm your faultless legs.

And I'm to blame.

You're crossing trackless places.

Slow your pace, I pray you.

Stay your flight.

I'll slow down too.

Do consider who your lover is.

I'm not some mountain dweller, not a shepherd, no scraggly guardian of flocks and herds.

Too rash.

You don't know whom you're fleeing from.

In fact, that's why you run.

I am the lord of Delphi's land and Kleros and Tenedos and Rigopeltra Jove.

Jupiter is my father.

Through me all is revealed what is yet to be, what was and what is now.

The harmony of song and lyre is achieved through me.

My arrow is sure in flight.

But when there is he whose arrow aims still more infallibly fallow.

Play.

Sorry, guys.

The one who wounded me when I was free of any love within my heart.

I am the one who has invented medicine.

But now there is no herb to cure my passion.

My art, which helps all men, cannot heal its master.

He would have said more, but Daphne did not.

Halt, afraid.

She left him there with half done words.

But even then the sight of her was striking.

The wind laid bare her limbs against the nymph.

It blew her dress fluttering, her hair strained in the breeze.

In flight she was even more beautiful.

But now the young God can't waste time.

He lost his patience.

His beguiling words are done.

And so, with love as spur, he races on.

He closes in just as Gaelic hound surveys the open field and sights a rabbit.

And both the hunter and the hunted race more swiftly.

One to catch, one to escape.

He seems about to leap on his prey's back.

He's almost sure he's won it.

His muzzle now is at her heels.

The other, still in doubt, not sure if she's caught, slips from his mouth.

At the last instant she escapes his jaws.

Such were the God and girl, while he is swift because of hope, what urges her is fear.

But love has given wings to the pursuer.

He's faster and his pace will not relent.

He's at her shoulders now she feels his breath, breath upon her hair and that streams down her neck.

Exhausted way worn, pale and terrified, she sees her father's stream nearby.

She cries out, help me, dear father.

If the river gods have any power, then transform, dissolve my gracious shape, the form that pleased too well.

As soon as she finished with her prayer, heavy numbness grips her limbs.

Thin bark begins to gird her tender frame.

Her hair is changed to leaves, her arms to boughs.

Her feet, so keen to race before, are now held fast by sluggish roots.

The girl's head vanishes and becomes a treetop.

All that is left of Daphne is her radiance.

And yet Apollo loves her still.

He leans against her trunk.

He feels the heart that beats beneath the new made bark within his arms.

He clasps the branches as if they were human limbs, and he lifts his kiss the wood, but still it shrinks from his embrace, at which he cries.

But since you cannot be my wife, you'll be my tree.

O laurel, I shall always wear your leaves to wreath my hair, my lyre, my quiver.

When the Roman triumphdoms crown their heads with garlands, as chants of gladness greet their victory, you will be there.

And you will also be faithful guardian, to stand besides the portals of the Augustan house and keep a close watch on the Roman crown of oak leaves.

And even as my head is ever young and my hair ever long, you unshorn, wear your leaves too.

Forever, forever, forever.

Never lose that loveliness, O laurel, which is yours.

So, Laura, trees are evergreens, they don't die in Thessaly, there's a deep set valley.

Apollo's words were done with new made bows.

The laurel nodded and shook her crown, as if her head had meant to show consent.

This is the story of Apollo and death.

Now, having heard it take two minutes, what was the tone?

How were they portrayed?

How do we create tension?

What imagery?

What is our response to her fate?

Ready, set, go.

I'm really tired, you know.

Me too.

Yeah, it was crazy.

She's basically like trying to escape the whole time.

I feel, like, kind of weird.

It's kind of weird how he was like trying to hug the tree.

Yeah, that was.

Yeah.

All right.

What are our thoughts?

What are some reactions?

What do we notice?

Yeah, now it's really interesting.

So that's the very current reading of it.

And I agree it feels creepy.

That's the vibe.

When I was in school, like middle school and high school, even into college, this was always called the love story of Apollo and Daphne.

This is always portrayed as a love story.

He loved her so much that.

Okay, think about how that talking about it in that way really changes the dynamic of things.

And, like, what's the undercurrent message if we portray it that way, which I don't think Ovid is trying to do.

I do not think Apollo.

Apollo.

It is portraying.

This is not as a love story.

I think it is supposed to be a bit creepy.

What gives the creepy vibe?

How does he create that tone?

She's terrified.

She's in distress.

Kind of that.

But just, like, he doesn't really, I guess, like, understand why he's not.

She's not loving him.

So it's, like, kind of creepy.

Yeah.

Lights on.

No one's home.

It's not computing.

Yeah, Yeah.

There.

He's not taking notes.

Dorothy.

Like a predator.

Yeah.

And uses, like, animal words.

The muzzle and, like, says she's, like, in his mouth.

Yeah, it's it.

It.

That's exactly it.

He's creating the creep factor because it's this hunter, hunted, predator, prey, language that's going on.

It's creating this tension.

It's creating this tension.

Okay.

Paulo, the God of civilization, of medicine, of music, of art, and she wants to be in the wilderness.

She wants to be a maiden.

She wants to live her life.

Okay, so we have this.

This conflict in play.

Good.

What else do we notice?

How do we feel about the story?

How do we feel about the ending?

What resonates or connects us to today?

I guess, like, he was.

Apollo was, like, trying to be, like, touching, violence, making that, like, tree for her, like, whatever.

But it comes across as, like, really creepy because she did deny him so many times.

Yeah.

Yeah.

It's sort of like she has to change herself in order to be, like, left alone, I guess.

Yeah.

She has to change herself to be left alone.

And even then, it's not enough.

Even then, he says, I'm still going to use your leaves.

Yeah, Yeah.

Again, that choice and voice.

Who has autonomy, who is able.

Remember, Ovid finishes this when he's in a place where he has no voice.

Okay.

He's been transformed.

He's been sent to a place.

Right.

Like, this power dynamic is being used because not that grave culture was more accepted or more common in ancient times than it is today, but it is a power dynamic that people are familiar with, and it's a power dynamic still today, unfortunately, that the predator often goes unscathed.

That the victim, even if they survive, is often left silenced, whether by societal norms, whether by the judicial system, whether By a number of things.

What makes it feel so relevant, at least for me today?

There's a lot of questions, a lot of things that come up in this story that still feel very timely.

Daphne's father says, or, you can want to not have a boyfriend, but you're too pretty.

Like, I feel like, what are you wearing?

What was she wearing?

Right?

Like, you must want me to hit on you because you came out tonight.

No, I came out to have a drink with my girlfriends.

Or I came out for whatever reason, because I am an individual person and can do what I want, right?

And we've said no.

And that's not enough.

At first.

He's like, oh, I can.

You don't know who I am.

Let me tell you who I am.

I'm not some shepherd who smells gross, right?

Like, so we have some social dynamics, but then again, we have that boasting that that pompous nature that is not exclusive to one gender or the other, right?

There are people out there who are like, oh, you just don't know who I am yet.

Let me tell you who I am.

And I'm so cool.

Right?

That's what's going on here at first.

And then there's the question again of autonomy.

Yes, Apollo's doing all these things, but who set the chain of events in motion?

Yeah, Cupid, right?

So then there's this question, this timely question of, like, did Apollo have choice?

Where does one's personal decisions and actions become his own?

Can we escape our fate?

Right.

Just because you have a bunch to drink doesn't mean you should get behind a car.

Oh, I'm so drunk.

I didn't realize we still made the choice, right?

Like, it's the same sort of question being asked of us here.

Yes, he was shot with love, but when she said no, that should have been enough.

At what point does one's own actions, right, who sets things in motion?

When do we have fate?

When do we have control of our own fate?

It's a compact story.

It's a tight narrative.

It's a tight vignette, super impactful, and it can be read a number of different ways.

Again, it can provide language for people for not knowing how to explain a situation.

And it also gives us an origin of some of the customs that we still subscribe to.

You know, should we be wearing laurel leaves?

I don't know.

Can we separate the fact from the fiction?

I don't know.

I don't have an answer.

I just like to add, that's the.

That's the Great thing about being a classics major or a philosophy major, you just have to ask the question.

You don't have to answer it.

You just throw it out there and see what happens.

Yeah.

Did Apollo turn her into a tree or did the river draw her father?

Yep, yep.

Her father turns her into a tree and then he says, now that you're a tree, I'm still going to take your branches.

I also love the last line because people are.

There are some school of thought that say, oh, well, she gives in in the end, she bends her head to him.

But if you read the Latin or this in particular, this translation, she says, she nods as if she was giving consent, as if it's not.

She's not doing it right.

So again, power of language, power of these scenarios.

And the thing that connects us, right, the thing that connects us is the human experience.

Nothing is new in 2025.

It's just given a new rebranding or a new packaging.

Okay?

The Romans talked about it thousands of years ago and that's what connects us as a school of Western civilization.

Of these impactful, impactful.

Again, a number of stories in the Metamorphoses giving a ton of examples of why things are the way they are.

Daphne and Apollo, probably the most famous of the stories and the one that if you go to pretty much any art museum, you will see a portrayal of some form of Daphne and Apollo.

So now again, when you go to these museums and you're playing is it Greek or is it Roman, you can come across a picture of Daphne and Apollo, you can dazzle your friends, or you can come across a painting from the Renaissance or Middle Ages and see a guy with a tipped over water jug and be like, oh, that's representing a river.

And then you're going to read the little plaque and it's going to say, oh, this guy representing a river.

And you're going to blow everyone away with your knowledge.

Okay, so any questions?

Any thoughts on Ovid as we, we wrap up Latin literature?

What was he trying to do at the end?

Like when he mentioned Augustus?

Yeah, what is he trying to do here?

That's the big question.

Is it praise or is it poking at the illusion that is this Augustine peace?

So he's citing the reference that conquering generals wear laurel leaves, that doorways in ancient Rome, oak is the symbol of Jupiter.

Again, the two gods that Augustus portrayed himself the most as that adorn doorways.

And it's is this.

Again, just as if she nodded in ascent, is this symbol.

Now that we know the story.

Is this really a symbol that is showing a real love or a real peace?

Or is it illusion?

Or is it the people with power spinning this propaganda, this story that he's trying to.

Because, remember, Augustus is trying, through Virgil, through Horus, through art, through architecture, trying to establish himself in this peace and this new government.

And perhaps Ovid is saying, maybe we need to look behind the curtain.

What's going on here?

Is it real or is it an illusion?

Is Apollo's real love or love real?

Is it drug induced?

Is it arrow induced?

Is it real?

He doesn't even know her.

Can we.

I mean, we didn't even.

In my Latin literature class, we talked about this.

Like, can he love someone?

Love at first sight?

Okay.

My husband says, yes, he fell in love with me the first time he saw me.

No, he definitely did not.

He fell in love with me the first time he saw me yelling at the TV at a Giants game.

Yes, that I believe.

But, you know, we can talk about, like, with Romeo and Juliet and all of these stories that we're supposed to buy into as a society that make up our kind of canon of.

They all kind of stem from this idea and different things.

Great question.

Other thoughts?

Observations, Questions.

There's a brand new.

I know you're all going to make your Christmas list now.

There is a brand new.

Just released last year, new translation of the Metamorphoses by a very talented classicist, a woman named Stephanie McArthur or McCarthy.

There's great podcasts that she's on that she talks about her whole process, but it's the first translation done by a woman and the first one done in about 50 or so years.

And she makes some very deliberate changes in some of the words that she uses, not straying from the Latin, because again, lost in translation, when we looked at Catullus, Right.

There are words that can have multiple meanings.

Some choose some meanings that are perfectly fine translations, and some choose other meanings that are perfectly fine.

And so the.

The differences that she chooses are pretty interesting.

So if you were looking for that last stocking stuffer Christmas list to put on for Santa, now you have a new book that you can put on your list.

All right, let's shift gears completely, but not so much because the gladiators were also wreathed in laurel when they won.

So it is kind of a nice segue to look at our first mode of entertainment, the gladiator games.

And the medieval writer Bebe once wrote, quam diu stabat colossus stabat et roma.

As long as the Classus stands, Rome will stand.

Quando caught at Colossus.

Caught it at Roma.

And when the Colossus falls, Rome will fall.

Okay, so even in the medieval world, the Colosseum, the Colossus is a symbol of Rome's power, of her might, of her enduring ness.

We'll make it a noun, and that is purposeful.

Going to talk about her humble origins.

Just like Rome itself, the gladiator games had very humble origins.

And how did they grow to this monstrous building that is really a physical representation of Rome's power and might?

All right, so when the Romans talked about gladiator games, they called them the Munera.

The Munera.

And just like everything else we've talked about, the Romans didn't come up with gladiator games.

The Etruscans did.

All right, so one of our, again, what is Roman?

We have heavily influenced by the Etruscans and Greeks.

But then the Romans are gonna adapt and evolve and make it their own.

So this was an Etruscan funerary rite where to honor a dead nobleman, two of his slaves would fight to the death as part of a funerary ritual.

By 264 BCE, Junius Brutus, so the legend goes, the first consul of Rome holds Rome's first gladiator matches in the Forum Borearum in the pig market.

And munis means duty or responsibility.

And there's a lot of words for responsibility or duty in Latin.

This one is specifically to the dead.

Responsibility or obligation to the dead.

So a remembrance of the dead man and his relatives.

So munis is the singular.

Munera is the plural.

Gain.

So they are remembrances to the dead.

As more and more of these gladiator games occur as funerary rites, they gain in popularity as sport.

And by the third century bce, they're pretty ubiquitous.

And occurring outside of funerals, not like outside of like a funeral, but like occurring outside the confines of funeral.

We don't need a funeral for a gladiator game to occur anymore.

And we start to see different amphitheaters popping up to hold these gladiator games, these monero.

So we're going to have gladiator games.

We need gladiators.

Here's a famous mosaic from Pompeii showing various gladiators.

Where do we get our gladiators?

There are three main sources that we can get gladiators for these games.

What are the three sources of gladiators?

Adding for slaves.

Slaves.

Very good.

Slaves who've committed certain crimes.

Good, Steven.

Prisoners of war Prisoners of war.

Yep.

Yeah.

Prisoners of war.

Foreigners.

Yep.

Slaves and just criminals.

Yeah.

And then especially once Christianity.

Christianity is considered a crime.

That's where we have the like with Daniel and the Lion.

Christian persecution in the Coliseum or diation.

Good.

So our three sources are captured prisoners of war, slaves who have committed some sort of crime.

And then convicted criminals of various sources.

Political prisoners.

Political criminals.

Rome doesn't have like a jail.

They had a car care, incarceration, holding jail till maybe you would have a trial.

And then you would either be free, you'd be exiled, or you'd be put to death.

There's no like long term penitentiary system in each.

That's not how they work.

So one of the ways is you can be thrown into the gladiator games.

Now, a common misconception with the gladiator games is that every game ended in what, death?

Yeah, that's a common misconception.

But you're businessmen and women, okay?

You're putting on a good game.

Think of NFL owners, think of Vegas and betting.

Because betting is huge here, okay?

If you're investing, think of horse racing.

If you're investing, can you have your product dying every game?

No.

Doesn't put on a good show.

You want to make the money, okay, we need a spectacle, we need athletes.

So while they may have come in as slaves, as prisoners of war, as criminals, there is some schooling that's going to occur because we need a better product, we need to make more money, we need to have a return on our investment.

Because I'm going to feed this gladiator and I'm going to train him.

And if he dies, like that's no use to me.

And I want the house always wins.

I want to run the odds in my favor because there's side betting that's going on all over the Coliseum and in Rome.

So I need to make sure to return my investment.

So because of this, there were, by the imperial time, gladiator schools, the glutus gladiatoris.

And so here is the most famous gladiator school.

You can see the Coliseum right there.

These are the remnants that they've recently uncovered.

And now you can actually walk in to the training grounds where the gladiators who were trained and Rome lived in Rome would live and train.

Or when people came to Rome for big events, they would house the gladiators there.

And there's a tunnel that connects right into the Coliseum so the gladiators didn't have to go out on the street.

And then today you can go as a Side trip if you want.

They have gladiator schools where you can, you know, train to be a gladiator for the day.

So when I bring my high school students, we go to gladiator school because it's, it is fun.

And so we have four gladiator schools by the imperial time that are run by the state, they're state funded, part of the taxes.

And the person who runs the gladiator school is normally a former gladiator himself and his title is called the lanista.

L a N I S T a the lanista.

And he has lived through enough gladiator fights where he was granted manumission.

So he received a wooden sword which is a symbol of freedom and he can retire.

There's no real retirement in Rome.

It's eat or be eaten.

So they normally go back to these gladiator schools to then continue their wealth, train gladiators, make money on them.

And so there's various training that's occurring.

Yeah.

Give you like, better like viewpoints.

Yeah.

You were a superstar.

Yeah.

So especially in Pompeii, there's lots of graffiti about different specific gladiators talking about he's won this many fights, he's a heart throb, A suspirarum is the word in Latin.

He's my heartthrob.

There's like graffiti about these famous gladiators and the more prestige.

And then you would be like, think of boxing matches, right.

Like the main event doesn't come on until 11pm and you have all these little matches beforehand.

As you grow, you're going into the big events and then eventually if you make enough money, you can buy your own freedom because you are allowed to take some of the winnings or if you win enough matches, then you are granted freedom.

And then you normally come back as a lanista, as a teacher in the gladiator school.

All right, so let's take a look at the training that these gladiators.

The gladiator is either a warrior hero or a villain to the bo.

He may have been a slave or a criminal or even a prisoner of war.

But now he's become a caged performing animal, fed a diet of high energy food and savage beatings.

He is an object of scorn, envy, admiration, even lust.

If he is lucky, stardom wins.

The crowd will chant his name and he will win his freedom.

But his days are spent honing the only skills for which he will ever be praised or valued.

Fighting, killing, dying.

Gladiators are trained in special facilities, the so called ludi or Games, literally.

But they probably weren't a whole lot of fun.

This is where land agers live.

These are barrack like facilities.

In the decades after the opening of the Coliseum, a huge training school with its own arena will be built next door to feed it with skilled fighters.

It looks small, but only compared to the Colosseum itself.

In fact, it serves as barracks for hundreds of men.

The training of gladiators in many ways parallels the training of Roman soldiers.

Just like a Roman soldier, a gladiator has to learn how to wield the sword.

So both legionaries and gladiators will train with a gladius, the standard two edged sword.

The gladius is designed for close quarter work.

Stabbing, slashing from behind a shield in the press of battle.

Many of the gladiators have seen firsthand how the legionaries use them.

They were prisoners of war, they'd faced them.

While legionaries are thought to kill with an efficiency that is almost industrial, the training that gladiators receive is different.

They have to be shown.

It's spectacle fighting, it's extremely ritualized.

It's a world apart from ordinary fighting, from soldiers fighting.

Because the Roman people are obsessed with gladiator fights, we're able to build a very clear picture of what one looked like.

There's written evidence, pictorial evidence, graffiti from the time, and most strikingly of all, this armor.

A gladiator's weapons of armor are his costume and his props.

These bits of gladiator's kit were found both in Herculaneum and Pompeii.

And they illustrate beautifully the extraordinary variety that you need to make a gladiatorian spectacle.

Look at this guy with this helmet with tiny little holes that gives him good protection.

The various styles of armor are made to represent the battle dress of Rome's conquered enemies.

This helmet is supposed to be a Thracian's helmet.

Now let's imagine that the Thracians were once upon a time gladiators who came from Thrace and were kitted out like Thracian soldiers.

But no Thracian soldier ever bore such a fancy thing as this with all this elaborate visor around his face, this really elaborate line to the helmet.

And then look at the decoration on wonderful Medusa's face.

Real battle armor offers its wearer the best possible combination of mobility and protection.

But again, gladiator armor is the.

Its purpose is to ensure that the spectators, connoisseurs of violence, see a very balanced contest.

Here's another way of doing it.

You've got bigger holes for the eyes and you can see his helmet is much more decorated.

But suppose he's pitted against the Batman, who chucks his net over you, brings you down, and can then get at your body, which, though your head is beautifully protected, your body is exposed.

Nobody should be fully protected.

Everyone's got to have the weakness, and the opponent knows which weakness to go for.

And of course, all the spectators know which weakness, and they're cheering on and they're seeing the skill with which each one both defends himself and attacks.

Training and experience are everything.

A gladiator's most dangerous fight is always going to be his first.

He has, on average, a 1 in 6 chance of dying every time he steps into the arena.

And these statistics are skewed by the fact that in every generation, a handful of elite killers fight dozens of bouts and win every time.

For those few feared, revered, loathed, and applauded, a kind of celebrity beckons.

All right, so what are some things that you learned or that stood out to you in this clip about gladiator training?

Celebrities.

They're celebrities.

Yeah, they're popular.

They're well known.

Good.

What else?

That they're, like, armored.

Like, doesn't really, like, fully protect them.

Yeah, yeah.

That they're supposed to be strengths and weaknesses in each type of gladiator.

That there are different types of gladiators.

Good.

What else?

Yeah.

So on average, they had a one in six chance of dying after that first fight.

Okay.

So if you make it, if you live through your first fight, then every subsequent fight is about a 1 in 6 chance.

Addie, they all, like, live together, so.

Yeah, yeah.

So there's this psychological element to it as well.

Where you're living, you're only as good as the person next to you and you're training, you form, like, you form these bonds, but then you also might have to fight against them in the arena.

Anything else?

So there are different types of gladiators, which the video started to suggest, showing the different types.

Evidence we have.

What did the early names of gladiators represent?

Sort of touched on this in the video, but also in your reading.

It explains further.

What do they represent?

Where they came from?

Yeah, they're supposed to represent either their skill set or the region or the style of fighter that they're emulating.

So, like, for example, the Thracian is supposed to represent a Thracian military.

Again, representative of what the Romans have conquered.

Okay.

We've conquered it, and now we're going to use it to our favor.

So each type of gladiator had its Own skill set and its own costume or armor.

And we have lots of different representations.

So we have lots of mosaics, we have tombs, we have literary evidence, like I said, graffiti evidence that tells us all the different types, the physical artifacts from Pompeii and Herculaneum to describe the different types of gladiators.

So here are some of the most famous, the ones that we often see depicted in the movies.

What are the most famous ones from ancient Rome?

So the first one is the myrmelo.

The myrmelo.

Does anyone remember from your reading, who's the mermelo?

Yeah, they have, like, heavy armor and, like, they just have, like, the best.

So, yeah, so they had, yeah, the heavily armored.

They have the big.

Looks like a fish helmet.

They have the curved legionary shield and a sword.

So they're heavily armored.

Now every.

Every gladiator has a plus and a minus to it.

Heavily armored, lots of protection.

But if it's heavy, what's your weakness?

Yeah, yeah.

You can't move that fast.

You're slow.

You're slow.

So again, you normally wouldn't pit two mermelo against one another.

You would pick another gladiator that has a different skill set so that there's this.

Again, again, it's a show.

You're making money.

You want it to be the best type of fight it can be.

So another type of soldier was hoppalimachus, and it's supposed to be like a Greek hoplite.

Hoplite is the Greek word for like their legionary soldier.

And he was often paired against a myrmoa.

So they were often.

Again, if you see one of those fights, they're normally paired against each other.

Other.

Then we have the secluder.

The secluder is literally means the follower to follow sequence sequential.

And they're lightly armed.

They have a helmet with two small eye holes.

They have greaves on their legs and an arm protector.

So like shin guards, but like metal shin guards, an arm protector.

They have a shield and a gladius or a sword.

And so these are lightly armed soldiers.

So they're fast, they're quick, they're agile, but they don't have a lot to protect them.

And they were often paired up against a Thracian or a retarius.

So a Thracian is again supposed to represent someone from Thrace.

They have the crested helmet with the visor.

So this tomb over here has what we normally think of as a gladiator with the visor coming down.

He has armored greaves on both legs, armored shin guards on both legs.

He Has a sword and a small shield.

So what we kind of think of as like the typical gladiator.

And then the rotarius rotaria is a fisherman's net.

In Latin, that's the word.

The rotarius is the fisherman, the net fighter.

He's the one with the large trident, an arm guard, a shoulder guard, and a dagger.

And he's the only gladiator whose face and head were completely uncovered.

Okay.

So you have the heavily.

They're fast fighting against each other.

The rotarius, that fisherman, he has the trident, he has the net, but his face and neck in particular are unprotected.

Okay.

And so in going to gladiator school, you're not only learning how to defend yourself, but also where your opponents are most vulnerable and where you're hoping to score those points to injure them or to kill them, depending on the type of fight.

Depending on the type of fight.

So all this occurs in an amphitheater.

So what's the venue?

The venue is an amphitheater.

The amphitheater is the shape of the venue.

So the earliest amphitheater in the Roman world is this one.

This one is in Pompeii.

You can go visit.

And it's constructed around 70 BCE.

This is when these games are really taking off for entertainment value.

And the amphitheater becomes a symbol of Romanization across the provinces.

So as Roman influence spreads, this is an example of their architecture that spreads with them, that they're bringing their culture.

There's about 200 still fully intact amphitheaters across the empire.

There's many in England, Libya, Verona.

The one in Verona, Italy, is phenomenal to visit.

You can climb all the way to the top.

The one in Pompeii, you can climb to the top, but it's not as tall as though in Verona, obviously, the Colosseum, there's some in Turkey.

And this amphitheater, amphi means both in Greek and theater, is the shape.

So the original shape amphitheater is really just two theaters put together to form this oval, creating the shape that we use for a football stadium today.

So they're ovular in shape.

The ground is harena sand.

Arena, Arena.

Arena.

Really get the word arena comes from it.

Why is the floor sand?

Does the floor stand in an amphitheater?

It can.

Yeah.

It can be hard to fight on.

Makes it entertaining.

You can use it to your advantage.

Yep.

Make the style more real.

Make the style more real.

Yeah.

It absorbs the blood clean up, then you sweep it out.

Okay.

These arenas also on the lower level have two gateways, the Gate of Life and the Gate of Death.

You're going out one, you come in, everyone comes in the Gate of Life, but you're only going out one of two ways.

Okay.

Obviously, spectators can go in through various gates, but the fighters themselves will go in through one of those or come in through one gate and will go out the other again.

All part of remnants of this ritualistic funerary practice that then morphs into this larger game and spectacle that is the Roman gladiator.

The most famous amphitheater in the Rome, in the Rome in the world is probably the Colosseum, the Flavian Amphitheater.

So in ancient Rome, if you were talking about the gladiator games, you wouldn't necessarily refer to it as the Colosseum.

You would refer to it as the Flavian Amphitheater because it was built by Emperor Vespasian, finished under his son Titus, with the funds from the war in Judea in defeating the Jews and all the loot that came from the temple in Jerusalem and the slaves built the Coliseum.

It gets its nickname, the Colosseum because of the Colossus statue.

That Colossus meaning huge statue that stood outside of it.

So you would go to the Colossus and then it just kind of takes on its own.

So for next class, we are going to look at the Coliseum as a structure as well as what it was like to go to the games.

What was the schedule?

What did it look like while you were thinking about and reading?

I want you to think about or make sure you know where is the Coliseum located and why is it a political decision?

Art architecture is a political choice.

Who built it and how was it funded?

I described you a little bit was by the Flavian emperors.

We're going to talk about the arena article.

The other article I would like for you to read is called Animals of the Arena.

How and why could their destruction and death be endured and enjoyed?

So on your way out, please make sure you grab one of these.

It talks about the psychology of viewing violence sports.

Okay.

And like what the Romans and many modern people who watch violent sports, like there's a whole psychology behind it.

So it's pretty interesting article.

And then linked on your syllabus is a podcast on the Coliseum.

If you could have a listen, that would be great.

So your only reading for Wednesday is this article and listening to the podcast and we'll take a look at the Coliseum in depth.

Okay, Have a great start to your week.