Kevin's Classics

This post is focused around the first chorus song, the parodos, in the Clouds. This song introduces the choir to the audience and informs them how to perceive the chorus; you can do only so much with costumes and attributes, especially in antiquity. As such, we can learn a lot on the nature of clouds according to the Greek in the 5th century BCE. Being personified godlike characters, the clouds reveal not only how they act as natural phenomena, but also as divine beings (although the divine aspect is a satirical jest of Aristophanes, yet there must lie some truth beneath this association).

A new blog post where I discuss the opening scene of Aristophanes's Clouds and give my reasons why I can relate to the protagonist in his opening lines. It contains the same theme as my Monday Mornings post so you may suspect I'm a bit intrigued by the process of sleeping.

One thing is certain. In love and in war, every promise is empty.

I have finally finished the first translation of my Translating Tibullus project (i.e. the last poem of book 1 about which I made an earlier post a couple of weeks ago). During the translation process, I came across some interesting themes in this poem, including the nature of death, idealisation of military life, and much more. But for now, I will not have you read the whole poem since I don't want to share my whole work immediately with you: patience is virtue. Instead, I will focus on the ending of the poem as this was most thought-provoking, heart-warming, and eye-opening.

This blog post is my first attempt at writing a poem in Latin. I hope you enjoy what I've fabricated in the couple of hours I spent on it. It is a short poem in the tradition of the Roman elegists I've been reading and must feel familiar for those who have read my translations of Ovid and Tibullus. The Latin is a bit stale since I am not experienced (like most people) in writing Latin poetry. That being said, I gave careful consideration to the meter, so feel free to read it out loud. You should be hearing the elegiac couplet as you are reading it.