I enjoyed listening to this a lot. Really thorough discussion and breakdown, and enjoyed listening to the class room dynamic. She seems like a really cool professor.

I ended up ripping my earbuds out of my ears on the second episode. The microphone must have been sitting right next to the chalkboard, and the squeaking of the chalk kept sending shivers down my spine. It’s one thing for this to happen occasionally but this was sustained for so long a period that I ended up abandoning the whole podcast because there’s no way I can even keep listening, much less absorb information. Having just read The Aeneid, I had such high hopes for this podcast.

I just finished the Aeneid (Mendalbaum, A. translation), and I learned so much to understand it from this scholar. I wish I could take online course with her. Thank you, Professor for giving your work for us.

I had to give up on this.

I’ve invested 4 hours now, and am giving it up—the amount of knowledge transferred per minute is extremely low, and ANY of the commercial “Notes” books will enable you to learn in a faster, more substantive, and orderly way. I come in with past classroom study of the Iliad and Odyssey, and expect real focus on the essentials that you need to “get” the work. This dear instructor doesn’t have a firm intent to get that done—and the “open mike” approach (any and all class questions and comments are allowed to interrupt and divert), combined with nonexistent editing of the recording, means that it moves at a painfully slow pace and just doesn’t deliver. This is STANFORD??

You could fill volumes with what this narrow specialist does not know. At one point, her student even knows more about the plot inconsistencies of the Aeneid than she does. I just felt bad for her students the whole time. Rather than going to the library and doing the research to answer their questions about archaeology or early Italian, she takes the lazy way out. She is my anti-role model as a teacher and as a scholar.