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| Cases mean prizes |
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| Metamorphosis of Narcissus |
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| Darnell gets mean |
Learning Classics is a bit like putting on a magic pair of 3-D glasses. Once you start delving into the language and the culture, you'll start to see it all around you. This blog is a record of the club's journey through the worlds and language of ancient Rome and Greece... and through modern times, too, searching for the influence of classics all around us. You'll also be able to find vocab, home tasks, links and generally enlightening info here, too.
14 November 2015
Lesson 7 - Curse you all!
Things got a bit nasty in Classics Club today...
First of all, we started off with a fairly fiendish language recap. Both groups did amazingly in the Millionaire Game, avoiding all the traps I set, recognising word endings (singular/plural, nominative/accusative) like TOTAL NINJAS to choose the right translation for the Latin sentence. If you want to play that game again (if only it were real money!), here's the link.
Next, we investigated some curses in ancient mythology: Tantalus, Narcissus and Arachne. To the right you can see an interesting interpretation of the Narcissus myth by surrealist painter Salvador Dali. Take a close look at the picture and see if you can relate any details back to the story of Narcissus. By the way, you can see this actual painting here in London at the Tate Modern.
In language work, we took a look at imperatives - verbs that command - which are very useful for casting curses, or, if you're in a more kindly mood, giving benedictions ('bene', well/nicely + 'dictum', thing spoken). Channelling our nice or nasty sides, we assembled a few imperatives together with adverbs on paper. Next week, we'll get all authentic and etch our curses on metal to make defixiones. These were curses written on lead and thrown into a sacred well to 'activate' them. You can see some brilliant examples at the Roman Baths in Bath - but more about this when we meet next week.