Lesson 15 - Masquerade!

As an end-of-half-term treat, we got all crafty and made some Greek comic masks. Inspired by the characters in Menander's Dyskolos, we designed some handsome young men, foxy young ladies, scheming parasites, wily slaves and wizened old crones. I'll let the pictures do the talking...

Lesson 14 - What's Latin for velcro?

Making the accusative singular feminine

The session started off with a verb warm-up, translating from Latin to English, using three new verbs: amare (to love), dare (to give) and festinare (to hurry). You're all getting pretty quick and accurate. Good stuff. And so onto something similar with nouns. By the power of velcro, we took masculine, feminine and neuter nouns and conjured up variations in nominative and accusative cases, and in the singular and plural. Then, putting our work with nouns and verbs to good use, we tackled some pretty tricky translations on paper.

So focused were we that we almost ran out of time for our weekly dose of Dyskolos. We recapped Pan's prologue, which sets the scene for the play. It's the usual tale of boy meets girl, girl's father won't like it, boy is forced into all kinds of schemes to win the object of his affections. We looked at the (slightly complex) inter-relationship of all the characters in the play: 

Next week, we'll be multi-tasking, making masks for the characters in Dyskolos, while at the same time performing a read-through of the play. Ambitious: could this all go horribly wrong? Quodlibet*. I'm sure as long as we all end up laughing, the ghost of Menander will look kindly on our efforts. Anyway, if you want some inspiration for your masks, have a look here at some pictures of both ancient and modern ones.


*=whatever