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Why instruct in poetry? How did didactic poems propagate, how were they used, and how did they interact with didactic texts in prose? This course will combine readings from Latin didactic poetry (Lucretius’s De rerum natura, Virgil’s Georgics, Ovid’s Ars amatoria, Manilius’s Astronomica, etc.) with analysis of scholarship on Latin didactic poetry and prose. In addition, we will consider the long heritage of these poems and some of their successors – what does Virgil’s Georgics have to do with Erasmus Darwin’s Botanic Garden; how did Lucretius’s account of the plague of Athens influence 17th-century English plague epics? Evaluation will be based on weekly participation in class and preparing and participating in a workshop of final papers.