Prescribed Text: Analysis and Interpretation
Moving from translation to interpretation
Analysis questions ask what the author is doing and how the language achieves it. Strong answers combine three elements: a precise observation about the Latin (a word choice, a sound pattern, a word order, a tense, a rhetorical figure), a translation or gloss of the words concerned, and a statement of effect on the reader or listener. An answer that says only 'this makes it dramatic' earns little; an answer that names the device, quotes the Latin, and explains the effect earns full marks.
Concepts you must understand
The prescribed texts reward knowledge of genre and convention. For epic, understand simile, epithet, ekphrasis, divine intervention, and the poet's narrative voice. For historiography, understand speeches, digressions, and the historian's shaping of cause and character. For elegy and lyric, understand the lover's persona, address to a beloved or patron, and the use of myth as parallel. For oratory, understand exordium, narratio, argumentatio, peroratio, and techniques of invective. Across all genres, know rhetorical figures: anaphora, chiasmus, tricolon, hyperbaton, alliteration, assonance, apostrophe, rhetorical question, praeteritio, and irony.
Common traps
Candidates often identify a figure without explaining its effect, or explain effect without quoting the Latin. Another trap is treating the narrator's voice as the author's own opinion - in epic and elegy especially, the speaker is a constructed persona. Questions asking about 'the reaction of the audience' require you to reason from the text, not from vague generalities about Roman society. Also beware questions that ask you to compare two passages: you must address both, not just the one you know better.
Rule of thumb
Use the three-step formula for every analysis point: device - quotation - effect. If you cannot name a device, describe the linguistic feature precisely (e.g. 'the verb is delayed to the end of the sentence').
Worked example
Arma virumque cano - the opening of an epic. Observation: arma (war) and virum (man) are placed in asyndetic pair, with the verb cano delayed. Effect: the poet announces both his subject and his own role as singer, and the juxtaposition of war and individual hero signals the poem's central tension.