Aeneis

This is the first time I returned to Virgil’s Aeneid since the late 1980s. I’d read Robert Fitzgerald’s translation in a college classics course. In high school, I’d read Homer’s Odyssey and absolutely adored it. In college, just before the Aeneid, I re-read the Odyssey and read Homer’s Iliad for the first time. I didn’t like the Iliad as much, but in recent years, and with different translations, I’ve grown to like it more. But, I detested the Aeneid. I thought it was a cheap rip-off of Homer, trying to compress both of his works into the single Aeneid, and doing a poor job of it. If Goodreads existed back then, I’d have given the book one star and moved on.

However, after much time and reengagement with Greek and Latin classical works, I decided to try the Aeneid again. This time, I chose John Conington’s mid-19th century translation. I really enjoyed his verse. In the great preface, he praises John Dryden’s translation, a copy of which I picked up for a few dollars not long ago. Conington notes that from time to time, new translations are a good idea to bring modern language in to reignite interest in a story and also to bring new insights into the text that have been learned since the last major translations (p. viii). While I was reading this edition, I kept by my side Seamus Heaney’s 2016 posthumous translation of Book VI, as well as Dryden’s 17th century version and a copy of the Aeneid in Latin. It got to be a bit unwieldy at times, but it was a lot of geeky fun!

Books I-VI are laid out a bit like the Odyssey and Books VII through XII are similar to the Iliad. For Virgil, the Odyssey is that of Aeneas, a son of a god (Venus) and a Trojan prince (Anchises). He leaves Troy after the fall, and eventually makes his way to the shores of Italy. In the second half, he works to establish what will eventually grow into Rome and the Roman Empire. As Virgil tells his story, we do learn more about the Trojan war (including how it ended) and even hear about one of Odysseus’s crew left behind after Odysseus blinded Polyphemus, the Cyclops.

Virgil’s work, on one level, is a political one. His patron was Augustus, the first Emperor of Rome. From notes I read elsewhere, the Aeneid can be read as both subversive of the new Emperor and reaffirming his place as a great leader. Virgil also works in other political issues, such as giving history to the struggle between Carthage and Rome (set in play by Aeneas sneaking away and Dido’s suicide, Book V). On a more Greek vs Roman level, I felt there were direct comparisons made between Aeneas and Homer’s Odysseus and Achilles, wherein Virgil always seems to show Aeneas in a better light.

I thought the translation was worth 5 stars, the “Odyssey” part of the Aeneid worth 4 and the “Iliad” part worth 3, so I thought I’d go with 4 stars for the experience as a whole. ( )

El primer fanfiction de la historia?

Pregunta:
Que libro relata los viajes y hazañas de un guerrero que sale del sitio de troya en busca de su hogar pero tarda años en llegar porque un dios le tiene mania?
La odisea? Si, claro! Y la Eneida

Pregunta:
Que libro relata guerra entre troyanos detras de una muralla y los ejercitos enemigos, centrada en la lucha entre sus dos guerreros mas importantes?
La iliada? Por supuesto, y la Eneida.

Virgilio toma a uno de los participantes de la guerra de troya (Eneas) y le hace vivir su propia guerra de troya y odisea. Copia descaradamente a un poeta griego mientras pone a parir a los griegos y todo lo que representan. A la vez ensalza a Roma, al imperio y a Augusto que es quien paga.

Fanfiction con publicidad

No le doy la peor puntuacion porque Virgilio escribe realmente bien. ( )

Another read this year for university ( )

A nicely done modern addition - even including the bracketed line endings.

Famous books fascinate me, a lot of things do, although I try not to write interchangeable boilerplate about them. This is a classic man, tell your friends about it! Tell your mom and dad! Tell strangers that you’re a Good Boy and that your mom and dad love you!

(That said, there is something to be said for giving the boss his due, and Roman war mythology is certainly about giving the boss his due. Even the gospel and Paul say that—give the master what’s his—and I don’t think that biblical Christianity is a status quo religion. The Roman war mythology so beloved to the baroque and the Victorianesque in many ways is, but.... I don’t know, it is true that sometimes you have to fight, to overcome, and it’s easy to see how that can get wrapped up into authority, even though historically this caused problems.... I suppose it’s not just fighting alone or authority alone, but both of them conspiring together, right.)

Ok, now that that’s out of the way, I read this as a religious thing, not an aristocratic thing, although I’m not a Roman Recon and in fact I laugh at them when they’re not looking! Yes, I pity the fool!.... Life lessons from the Aeneid: Romans are great; people who fight the Romans die.... And women are filthy beasts.

Seriously though, it’s very much Roman state paganism, Official-like, and I’m glad that I’m not a Roman state pagan or someone living in Ancient Rome. “The sword decides all.” (I know that might be translator’s liberty, but it’s certainly the spirit of the thing, isn’t it?) The Romans and their government were very military; most governments are, but the Romans, who oppressed so many nations—everybody except the Nazis look good!—and fought so many wars, they were /really/ military. And I don’t have much, you know; I’m doing okay by Ancient Roman standards, but back then I’d probably be among the sneak class, among the sharpers, among the missing, so to speak....

You get the idea. I’d be poor boy Dickens, although urban poverty in Ancient Rome probably would have made even Dickens blush, not only was the standard of living not increasing, even the population wasn’t, and as long as the gangsters got their cut—the biblical tax collectors, right, everybody knows from Bible class that Roman tax collectors were thugs—but that was what made the world go around, Augustus and his men getting what was theirs, and other people didn’t even have a religion most of the time, that was for them, I mean, because the state religion was about the rich and their power and violence too. ‘The sword decides all.’

But it’s good background reading for a wizard (^) in training, even if these people were dying for a little church magic, a little And many of the last shall be first, and the first last. Or even just a little witch-feminism, although I like my religion nice and convoluted, not like witchcraft alone.

But although I am trying more for wizard (^) than witch, this seems very androcentric, both in the war and in the poem. (I think if Aeneas had one day off every two weeks he’d use it to go to a sporting event in a giant arena, then come back to work and be like, When I was off you bastards probably didn’t work! It’s a caricature, it really is. Unconscious self-caricature, but not uncommon.) Women in Roman society could neither fight nor hold authority; they were forced to be feminine, but Juno gets no credit for being feminine; she’s The Enemy. The enemy of Rome is Woman! Right? Of course mythology isn’t like real life so even the women, like Camilla, are allowed to be passionate and fight, but even most of Camilla’s girls are a joke to the Romans....

(^) Actually druid would probably be the better word, kind of a Celtic, Euro-alt mystery religion, kind of a wizard. But the point is I want to know everything, to the fullest extent possible, including witchcraft but not limited to it.

Remember when Paul talked about prostitutes he basically said, Why sleep with someone you don’t like? At his worst Paul doesn’t like women, and doesn’t want to associate with whom he does not like. But in Roman war mythology you don’t flinch. ‘Why sleep with someone you don’t like? Why, because the sex is good.’ It’s just.... bad.

It wasn’t all Virgil did—“I sang of farms, pastures, and commanders”—and I expect the farmer-poems to be less chauvinistic than the soldier-poems, if saccharine and otherwise not /completely/ non-chauvinist. Kinda natural that people are screwy of course, and naturally faults from one area of society bleeds into another, especially when they share personnel. But anyway, I’m not sufficiently weird to read the obscure books before the one that people have heard of.

.... I mean, everybody’s got something, and Virgil certainly has a certain literary style, right. I don’t think that literary style is the Only Best Kind, but it can be attractive. It’s just that when that adorns something bad instead of good, it becomes a problem. (*) “/sneer/ Juno! Goddess of women and motherhood and Africans and all things non-Roman, and who hates our Roman hero man with a despicable hatred! Romans! Will we stand for such a thing!”

/sneer/ Dawdling with women, are we? Well that’s not Roman! /starts swinging a sword around randomly/

(*) Might as well go for the jugular, right: I was watching this KKK documentary and they were showing a cross burning (“cross lighting”) and they stood in a circle around this giant cross and this guy took a torch and lit everyone else torch, and as he did so said, “Klansman, do you accept the light of Christ?” and the response was, “I accept the light!” And it’s like, poetry without morality is the devil’s work, but watching that I was like, Damn, that’s good liturgy.

Anyway. It is good liturgy though. Brother, do you accept the light of Chinua Achebe? I Accept The Light!!! Yeah.

“Empire without end”, now that’s really rich. Money never dies! A man with a sword. Can. Never. Die!! hahaha

I mean, I don’t necessarily have a problem with the non-Christian, but this is veritably /sub/-Christian!

“You don’t really love me you just like the attention.”

That is, although anything can be read to some profit and this can be read to understand hints of how some people have understood nature’s gods, and maybe some of those people sometimes less chauvinistic than they are on this particular day in time, but overall I think that the problems with the text are greater than you’re likely to believe. A lot of people read this book as an ego trip for hundreds and hundreds of years, and even today the ego trip theory of literature is Very Influential.

Ironically it’s also a little knowledge-phobic. Aeneas sees the future, but he doesn’t remember; his victory comes down to sheer musculature. And those Greeks! Lying, scheming Greeks! To think a war could be won by a man who doesn’t have more hair than the other man!.... Very ironic.

It’s angry religion, folks.... I’ll spare you the examples; I’d have to reproduce the text.

Lord Grantham: Really, Branson, I think that’s quite enough. And if you’re quite finished, I’d like you to go get the car.

Anyway I hope that doesn’t make it sound like I don’t like Italians, but the Romans weren’t really “Italian”; they were the Star Wars Empire, right.

.... One thing is amazing, though, how Baroque and Victorian and Edwardian could read someone like Virgil and think that he spoke for them.

Lord Grantham: /talking to his friend/ Oh! Virgil, yes I’m just like him! Just the other day I said to that low-born wife of mine, Get down lunar bitch! Animalistic, frenzied woman! Sit down, be still when your master calls! /beat/ At least, I told her she couldn’t inherit the estate. I think my exact words might have been, Dearest darling, you are too good! Too good! And too good, for that!..... Things like that don’t change though; we’re a lot like Virgil. Things don’t change.... Can you imagine that Branson doesn’t like it? Mythology and superstition, he calls it, that blasted serf..... I think that the way that the Latin word ‘animalistic’ rolls off his tongue makes him better than me, but only in a way. Really I am better than he is, for my hands are clean.

I am a Good Boy!

At least The Beach Boys were consistent, right. Heh.

Now see here, Brian Wilson, do you know enough Latin to call your wife an animalistic bitch in the Proper Language?
/gasp/ Professor! I am a Good Boy!
/the class laughs/
Shut up, you swine! Civilization is really going downhill, now that it’s 1961! You just don’t understand! You’re not good! You’re not, Good!!!

.... Although in a way the whole, ‘animalistic bitch’ thing makes sense, from their point of view. We can’t expect Virgil to call Them /more Christian/, now can we?

.... Of course, I find the content—blood blood blood said the Man—so silly that it’s tempting to dismiss the style too, although I’ll allow the style to be good and poetry to be good. Blood! Blood so thick, cried the Man, best of captains, that mythological foes and foreign legions this day will—I don’t know, you get the idea, but I’ll allow that he doesn’t literally curse and say Blood blood blood said the Man as he refines his rather effeminate chauvinism.

.... God, it’s funny though. This is not as good as Shakespeare, in any language.

It’s like when I’m watching a Japanese fighting cartoon; the guy will be talking for ten or even twenty minutes, but all the subtitle says is, ‘I will kill you’.
~ Downfall Hitler

Fifty, a hundred lines later: ‘.... Killing you is what I really, really, really, really want.’

.... Without profound shit comes pettiness, and with it often comes pride or anger.

.... And then there’s Virgil. Virgil on the problem of evil: it’s the women. God wills good, but women will evil; the wife and the mistress claw at each other, for the hatred that’s in it. My my, if only there were only God, and no wife or mistress!

.... Anyway it’s a bit like sci-fi on a bad day. (“We can’t just show the Cylons wandering around Galactica gunning people down for twenty minutes—as much fun as that would be.” ~RDM).

Thou shalt kill.

Aside from style, it’s all action, all plot.

No, I’m sorry, the theme is “how to kill someone with a spear”, and the characters are Hero Man and Dead Man Walking.

/Virgil doing a writer’s workshop/ And now we have to get down and really touch the blood, feel it, ask yourself, what does this remind me of? Yes? Anyone? You, in the back.

Blood metaphor!

Now you’re a poet!

.... ‘one man in the moil [drudgery] of war’, indeed. Hack hack hack. Blood blood blood. Hack, hack, hack. Raise arm, lower arm. Raise arm.... ooh, I think I pulled something. Too much hacking! I’m overtraining!.... Hey guys, being a pirate is turning out to be too much like a real job.... I want to go home now....

“I think I’m going to go to the gym.”
“You can’t always go to the gym.”

Never been so appreciative of Paul hahaha. ‘You guys can’t just flex your muscles anymore. That’s old-fashioned. The new wave thing is to sit around and think—think about God, think about philosophy, think about what words mean....’ ‘Going to the gym bye.’ ‘You know if you go to the gym everyday you’ll get stale. Take a day off. Take a day off with God, man, with Christ.’

Fat Aristocrat: Gym Rat is just like me; he’s my best friend. /wipes away a tear/
Paul: /sneers/ You’re a poor judge of character. Do you even read psychology? I wrote a book on marriage a couple of years ago—
Fat Aristocrat: I am ready for war!
Paul: /beat, then/ Although I’m not versed in psychiatry.