Carmina · Unit 6

Let Us Live and Love

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Supplementary

This passage is not on the official 2025 CED required reading list — most of these were required under the previous (2012–2025) syllabus. Useful context, but not examinable as syllabus reading.

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Latin text from The Latin Library (public domain). This source does not mark vowel quantity; macrons are not shown because they would have to be invented. Click a line number to flag it as hard, or select any span of text to highlight it or attach a note. This passage’s place on the syllabus is set by the CED’s required reading list(opens the official AP Latin CED, PDF).

English summary

Hidden — construe first.

Context notes

NOT on the official 2025 CED required reading list — the syllabus is fixed to Vergil and Pliny — but placed here in Unit 6 ("Course Project and Teacher's Choice Poetry") as one of the most famous and most frequently taught short poems in the entire Latin corpus. Written in hendecasyllabic metre (eleven syllables per line), not the Aeneid's dactylic hexameter, so it is not included in the Scansion Lab, which is built specifically around hexameter. The poem's closing image — deliberately losing count of the kisses — plays on a real Roman superstition: naming an exact large number let an envious enemy cast the evil eye (invidere) on exactly what you had, so the lovers scramble the sum on purpose.

Themes

carpe diemlovemortalitykissesdefying gossip

Vocabulary coverage

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