In this course we will read together a series of Latin texts from the Republic through the early Augustan era, at a pace of about thirty Oxford Classical Text pages of prose or 1000 lines of verse per week. We’ll begin with Plautus and end with early Livy, taking in along the way Cicero, Catullus, Lucretius, Sallust, Vergil’s Eclogues, and Horace’s Satires. All assignments will be drawn from the Classics PhD reading list. Most of the time and effort we invest in the class will go towards attaining good understanding of the Latin we are reading together. Beyond this, though, we will regularly want to talk from an interpretative perspective about what we read. Recurrent questions will include the continual transformative engagement of Roman with Greek culture, the relationship of literature to the upheaval and eventual revolution of the latter part of the first century BCE, and the development of ideas about authorship and career. The final grade will be based in part on contributions during class but mainly on twelve translation quizzes.