Sovereign Conference

The lower sixth Latin set headed up to the buzzing surroundings of central London on Tuesday for some eye-opening teaching on Latin literature.

Meeting with hundreds of other motivated young Latin scholars they heard four top academics from Oxford university lecture on Ovid and Cicero.

The first two lectures were on Cicero’s powerful speech against Catiline, the revolutionary senator who probably tried to overthrow the Republic. Cicero presents Catiline as a dangerous, psychopathic opponent of civilisation and order (as he is portrayed in the recent novel, Lustrum, by Robert Harris), but the first speaker suggested he was more likely to have been riding a rebel bandwagon that was already rolling.

In the afternoon, the lectures were on the poet Ovid, specifically on how he plays with our expectations about genre. The Romans would have had the same expectations of poems as we do films: we expect certain films to be action-packed thrillers full of carnage and special effect and others to be mellower rom-coms, with slow songs, beautiful heroines and bumbling heroes. Ovid turns this whole system inside out, leaving us with the literary equivalent of Hugh Grant busting the bad guys with a light-sabre before stumbling over his words to Julia Roberts.

Intrigued? Well then choose Latin…