Eve Cody's Senior Project: Reading and Translating Tacitus' "The Annals"

The final week of my senior project is just about over, and I have spent most of it stepping away from The Annals and researching or doing grammar and vocabulary exercises instead. My goal of 30 pages was definitely overambitious. I assumed I would be able to finish two pages a day, five days a week, which seemed reasonable to me at the time, especially considering I would become more comfortable with the text as I progressed. However, I didn't take into account that like gaining fluency in translating, building productive and consistent habits also takes time. I don't think I was ever able to spend five hours a day doing nothing but translating. I did become more efficient over time, but it was not enough to meet my goal.  I recently met with a Classics professor at Reed, where I will be taking a class in the fall, who told me not to work any more on The Annals , because it is such a challenging text. There were many places where I felt out of my depth, even though I could ge...

  Throughout this week, I’ve been making steady progress and increasing my pace. I also used the long weekend to make up for my inconsistent schedule, which is still a struggle for me. While I am beginning to balance research and practice with translation, I could not meet my goal of 30 pages if I took more regular breaks to work on other aspects of this project. But although 30 is ideal, I will probably fall short of my target at my current rate anyway, so I’ll try broadening my focus more next week.   I’ve been thinking about a few different questions that might offer useful context for The Annals. I’m very curious about reading in general in Ancient Rome. I wonder, how were books made and distributed? Was reading a pastime or mostly for business and education? And what are the implications of this regarding Tacitus’ audience? I did a web search for "literacy in Ancient Rome" in order to locate some potential general sources, but I found different answers from each one. Th...