In this course we will read together a series of Latin texts from the Augustan era to the late second century CE, at a pace of about thirty Oxford Classical Text pages of prose or 1000 lines of verse per week. We will proceed roughly chronologically from the late twenties BCE, beginning from Horace’s *Odes*, through the last decades of the second century CE, ending with Apuleius’ *Metamorphoses*. All Latin texts 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 interpretive perspective about what we read and we seize the opportunity to survey the landscape of literary activity in Latin in the early Principate and to explore some of the salient issues surrounding genres, periods, authors, and particular works.