Hello all! My name is Max Massa; I’m a novelist using works of Greek and Latin writing as material for my writing, and my first published work - House of Apollo - is due to be released this month (December 2019). My interest in both languages is mainly driven by access to the literature, which then puts me in contact with the ideas it contains.
I’ve been studying classical languages on my own since 2006. I approached the study of Attic because I’d majored in Chinese in college and been spending so much time both living in China and studying Chinese that I realized I had no solid idea what the intellectual underpinnings of western society were. So I started with Mastronarde and ultimately wound up spending a lot of time on Plato and the orators, later moving into the dramatists. Latin followed later, when I picked up Hans Orberg, and I focused mainly on the poets with him, but have recently begun to pay more attention to prose. My decision to sign up with TextKit was driven by my desire to break into Neo-Latin, which will be important for my next (as yet unnamed) novel.
My first book, the aforementioned House of Apollo, was mainly driven by the Homeric Hymns, Euripides, and Callimachus, alongside Nietzsche’s Birth of Tragedy. The piece I’m working on now will draw heavily on Neo-Latin: Decembrio’s Life of Filippo Maria Visconti and probably additional matter from Francesco Filelfo and Angelo Poliziano. I use these sources for their ideas only; actual characters from the literature and history do not and will not appear in my writing, except as reflected or embodied in symbolism. My motive is that I feel it’s better for creative workers to exploit the content rather than the form of ancient texts.
I do my reading in the original. I have the profound fortune of keeping a badly battered Forcellini and a taped-up Glossarium Manuale ad Scriptores Mediae et Infimae Latinitatis available in my home.