Garden City High School Latin Teacher Linda Fabrizio has published a Teacher's Guide to Cicero's pro Archia Poeta Oratio (Speech on Behalf of the Poet Archias), one of three options in the Latin Literature portion of the Advanced Placement (AP) curriculum.

At the invitation of the publisher, Bolchazy-Carducci, Ms. Fabrizio spent 18 months writing the new guide. The project involved amending existing notes in a college text newly published for high school students; providing a large-print text of pro Archia for teachers to photocopy and use with overhead projectors; creating a manual with a full translation and questions with long and short answers; and compiling a bibliography.

A new high school guide was necessary because the NYS Regents recently added pro Archia to the AP Cicero syllabus.

Ms. Fabrizio uses passages from pro Archia in Latin III, a non AP class. "Cicero starts his speech by defending Aulus Licinius Archias, a poet charged with falsely claiming to be a Roman citizen, and then turns his argument into a sweeping and very beautiful defense of the arts and humanities," she said.

In her AP course, Ms. Fabrizio uses another AP option: the Vergil syllabus, which focuses on the Aeneid, an epic poem that describes the adventures of the Trojan hero Aeneas. "Vergil is my favorite Latin author," she said. "His epic is a fabulous story about the founding of Rome and a classic of Western literature."

For the AP class, students are required to read the entire Aeneid in English and to translate more than 1800 lines from the Latin. On the examination, they must translate portions of the epic, write several essays, and answer multiple choice questions.