Annual Exam Study: Advanced Poetry
Students reading Vergil, Ovid, Catullus, or Horace.
Optional advanced track after Year 4. For classes reading Latin poetry.
This practice exam has 40 multiple-choice questions in about 45 minutes and includes an original poetry passage. Scansion of dactylic hexameter and the elegiac couplet belongs here, with 12 Roman-world questions, 18 language questions, and 10 reading questions.
Question groups: Culture, history, and literature, Language, Reading comprehension.
Practice the Advanced Poetry level · Timed practice set
Poetry language
- The prose grammar of the advanced level, plus poetic forms, syncopated verbs, and Greek accusatives such as Aenean.
- Dactylic hexameter and the elegiac couplet: dactyl, spondee, and elision.
- Devices such as metaphor, simile, chiasmus, and onomatopoeia.
Authors and stories
- Vergil, Horace, Ovid, Catullus, and the comic poets Plautus and Terence.
- Trojan War stories and transformations such as Orpheus and Eurydice or Pyramus and Thisbe.
- Ideas such as pietas, gravitas, virtus, fides, dignitas, auctoritas, mos maiorum, and humanitas, a first look at Stoic and Epicurean thought, and places poets name, such as Ithaca and Delphi.