Textbook and Context: "The Next Aeneid "

The convener of the spring 2002 CAAS panel on New Directions in Teaching and Research on Vergil, Judith Hallett, has recently championed "the personal voice" in classical scholarship;² for that reason, I want to begin this essay with a reminder—to myself as well as to my readers—that teaching, too, is an expression of the personal voice. Every teacher who has survived the first few years in the trenches and who has moved beyond the basic survival skill of keeping on top of (or at least appropriately adjusting) the lesson plan or syllabus has at some point, in some way, asked herself not only how to teach what she has been assigned or has chosen to teach, but also why this assignment and/or choice has taken the shape it does. In a perfect world, our students (and we) could read everything, and we would not have to choose from or prioritize among the vast array of texts available to us; but, at least when it comes to teaching Latin, the world is indeed not perfect, and there really is not and never will be enough time to teach our students enough of/about what we wish they (and we) had more time for.

I describe this dilemma to provide a context for my perspective on the teaching of Vergil's Aeneid in American classrooms, especially AP classrooms. I write from a vantage point which, while not perhaps unique, is certainly distinctive: for over a decade now I have, personally and directly, influenced in a variety of ways the teaching of Latin in hundreds of schools, colleges, and universities throughout North America. I am sensitive to the fact, furthermore, that my influence, subtle but instrumental, is not likely to decrease for the foreseeable future. From 1989 to 1997, I served on the Advanced Placement Latin Test Development Committee of the Educational Testing Service, and was its chair for three of those years. In this capacity, I worked with colleagues across the country involved in the AP program not only to support the status quo by ensuring the reliability of the AP exams year after year, but also to make new policies that would lead to an overall improvement in the AP Latin experience. The results of these new policies included the introduction of the Latin Literature exam, the addition of selections from Aeneid books 10 and 12 to the Vergil syllabus, and the move to a three-hour time-slot for the Latin exams in the AP lineup. This work, while both immensely satisfying and surprisingly demanding, has in turn raised a set of issues and questions for me about the priorities which shape both teachers' and students' experience of Vergil and which have consequences far beyond our classrooms. I want to explore these concerns in this brief essay.

My focus is on the set of interrelated issues and questions which are implicated in the way in which we teach Vergil's Aeneid today—and I include here not only the methods and approaches we exploit, but the way in which we divide up the text itself into selections most worthy to be read. Again, I have personal experience here which transcends my own classroom: I have recently completed the second edition of a revision of selections from books 1, 2, 4, and 6 of the Aeneid as edited by Clyde Pharr, assembled, together with my "Pharrized" versions of selections from books 10 and 12, into a textbook for use by AP teachers and students, as well as by others.³ I have thus ensured that thousands of students every year will have their first (and in most cases their only) exposure to the Aeneid in an incomplete form, working as I am on the assumption that an incomplete version is the only realistic alternative to no Aeneid at all. While working on this textbook, I have also had ample time to reflect upon both the role of any textbook in shaping the tastes and attitudes of its users, and the potential this book in particular has to affect contemporary approaches, both pedagogical and critical...