Priapea

The aim of this book is to make the Priapea (or Corpus Priapeorum or Carmina Priapea) accessible to intermediate students of Ancient Latin. The running vocabulary and grammatical commentary are meant to provide everything necessary to read each page so that readers can progress through the text, improving their knowledge of Latin while enjoying a fascinating group of poems. The Priapea is a great text for intermediate readers. The sentence structure is fairly simple, and the range of syntax is rather narrow. However, there are many off-color jokes and double entendre that require some thoughtful attention to the connotations of many ordinary words. There is considerable wittiness deployed in creating variations on a small number of obscene themes and scenarios, so that there are examples of the whole range of technique in Roman poetic practice.