![]() Quem neque pauperies neque mors neque vincula terrent, Quisnam igitur liber? sapiens sibi qui imperiosus, Tu, mihi qui imperitas, aliis servis miser atque He outlines ways in which Horace is in fact servile to his aesthetic tastes and desire for money and riches: Io saturnalia translation license#Horace’s Satires 2.7 contains a powerful speech delivered by Davus, a supposed enslaved person of Horace, who uses the license granted to him on the holiday to challenge Horace’s dominion and supposed freedom. Importantly, this season of ‘good tidings’ was explicitly and brutally temporary the return to the rigid hierarchy of enslaver-enslaved returned every year by the end of Saturnalia, as memorably described by the formerly enslaved Epictetus in Discourses 4.1.58. This seasonal qualified freedom is encapsulated in Horace’s memorable description of Saturnalia as the libertas Decembri, “December freedom,” in Satires 2.7.4. ![]() Enslaved persons may have also been invited to games, gambling, and poetry competitions, activities from which they were generally forbidden. The December holiday was associated with a sort of topsy-turvy “role reversal” of enslavers and enslaved persons, with a number of accounts detailing a banquet provided to enslaved persons by their enslavers. Some instructors incorporate more of ancient Roman cultural practice others focus on its possible ties to modern Christian rituals in the lead-up to the Christmas holiday.Ĭomparatively less focus, however, is paid to Saturnalia’s complicated relationship to the institution of Greco-Roman chattel slavery. Festive recreations often revolve around learning about the Roman god Saturn, decorating the Latin classroom leading up to a winter break, blurting out the customary Saturnalia greeting-“Io! Saturnalia!”-and gift-giving and dressing-up. In ancient Rome, Saturnalia was regarded as the finest and happiest holiday ( optimo dierum, “the best of days”, in Catullus 14.15). Saturnalia celebrations are a common December tradition in many secondary Latin classrooms and in youth classical organizations around the world. I recently applied this framework to teach the Roman holiday of Saturnalia. It asks that we make explicit the cultural product, practice, and perspective (the 3P’s). The 3P Model, a pedagogical framework to deepen engagement with a cultural product in classroom teaching, is a powerful tool for developing this sort of deep cultural analysis in the secondary classroom and for adapting existing language acquisition activities into opportunities for intercultural learning. By thinking about and reflecting on how class, gender, race, ethnicity, and, broadly, identity functioned in the daily lives of the peoples of the classical world, students are able to i) gain a much richer understanding of their own culture-or, more precisely, cultures-and ii) better and more accurately examine Ancient Mediterranean cultural practice and knowledge. Incorporating contemporary social history into Classics can help students and teachers access deep culture in the context of Ancient Mediterranean peoples. Students may wonder: Why did the Romans conduct their holiday ceremonies in the way they did? Who participated? Who didn’t? ![]() Recreated celebrations of ancient Roman holidays in today’s classrooms can lack “deep” culture if conducted only on the surface-level. In this piece I’ll give educators a simple tool for demystifying this process and ensuring that they teach culture on both its surface and deeper levels.įor Latin educators face this problem: excited to introduce Roman cultural practice into their classrooms, we may focus on the what and how of Roman culture rather than the why and who. In fact, to enhance their students’ intercultural understanding, language educators should be careful to teach both what is generally called “surface” culture (e.g., types of clothing, food, fairytales, music, art-essentially the ‘facts’ of a culture) and the “deep” culture of a studied group (e.g., perspectives, values, history, narratives, ideas, and background beliefs that, in a sense, underlie the surface culture). Io saturnalia translation how to#But it can be difficult to know how to teach culture in a rigorous and systematic way. One of the special gifts of teaching language is the opportunity to introduce our students to culture(s). This piece appeared in a longer form at the Journal of the History of Ideas Blog. ![]()
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