mothwing | Saturday with Cicero

Segesta oppidum est pervetus in Sicilia, iudices, quod ab Aenea fugiente a Troia atque in haec loca veniente conditum esse demonstrant.

That he should have had the time to do that at all while he was fleeing is a miracle. I certainly would not have stuck around to found the odd village while I was on the run, especially considering he was carrying around Anchises.

I never realised how much I had forgotten, but at the same time, it's vaguely reassuring how to realise how many of the things I learnt back in 2002 are still there. Too bad that my motivation deteriorated towards the end and I don't have the sound basis of half remembered knowledge on the subjunctive and more complex constructions involving relative clauses that I have for most other things.

I've spent the day I should have used to write my various papers poring over the speech against Verres, and while I can absolutely sympathise with the Sicilians, I'm lost in the constructions more often than not. It would be fun, reading Cicero again (... even though, irrationally, after reading Harris's Imperium, my sympathy for Cicero has diminished greatly because he left Terentia, who was one of my favourite characters in the novel) if there wasn't this horrible exam at the end of it all.
I'm feeling very sorry for myself because of that exam.

It consists of a written and a dreaded oral part. What makes the oral part even more panic-inducing for me is that we have to take it after the written exam, but without knowing how many points we received - which means that we can technically have failed already when we take the oral. Oh, we're not invited if we fail the written with zero points, though.

It's organised by the school authorities and conducted in classical grammar schools in Hamburg (the Johanneum [founded in 1529 and hardly changed since then] and the Klosterschule [1872, used to be an all-girls school], to be more precise. I've got nightmares about them already, and the way the people discuss them, the tactics they would use in either school, and their advantages and disadvantages reminds me a lot of overheard conversations about Scarlet Monastery my brother and his friends had).

Scores of people fail every semester, and of course you only ever meet the people who failed, so there's a permanent fox-in-the-hen-coop atmosphere in our course, and every opportunity is used to abuse the examiners or to relate the worst exam experiences. Last semester, the entire group of students doing their orals on that one day were all failed in one of the schools (the Johanneum. Please, dear god, don't let me be examined in the Johanneum!) and there is one teacher who is famously known for being unfair to students - but, luckily for me, only to good-looking, tall, thin, long-haired blonde female students, it seems. There are three girls in my course who were failed by her who fit the description. I felt irrationally grateful for not being blonde and thin when I heard that - but I doubt that being short, dumpy and spike-haired will help.

Other than renewing my acquaintance with Cicero's language and works I've spent the day fangirling Michael Praetorius and Giorgio Mainerio (especially the Schiarazula Marazula: