Word: vergil
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...Roman poet Vergil in The Aeneid called rumor "a huge and terrible monster," and Wall Streeters last week would have agreed. The intense speculation about Pennzoil was part of the high-stakes legal battle the company has been waging with Texaco. In November a Houston jury ordered Texaco to pay Pennzoil $10.53 billion in damages for snatching Getty Oil away in a 1984 takeover battle. After a Houston judge upheld the jury's decision, Pennzoil and Texaco negotiators tried to forge an out-of-court settlement...
Thank the gods that copyright law was not discovered in the Iron Age. If it had been, and if Homer had been succeeded by some litigious heirs, the vast trove of Western literature derived or extrapolated from the Iliad and Odyssey--including Vergil's Aeneid, Dante's Inferno, Chaucer's Troilus and Criseyde, Shakespeare's Troilus and Cressida, Tennyson's Ulysses, Joyce's Ulysses--might not exist. And what damages would today's judges award Christopher Marlowe? He wrote a wildly popular poem called The Passionate Shepherd to His Love that was answered, in identical verse form, by Sir Walter...
When Dante Alighieri compiled his great medieval Who's Who of heroes and villains, the Divine Comedy, the highest a non-Christian could climb was Limbo. Ancient pagans had to be virtuous indeed to warrant inclusion: the residents included Homer, Caesar, Plato and Dante's guide, Vergil. But perhaps the most surprising entry in Dante's catalog of "great-hearted souls" was a figure "solitary, set apart...
...19th century, like Theodore Rousseau and Charles Daubigny, or the more recent vision of Monet and the Impressionists. Corot's career began in the 1820s, at a time when classical landscape--the ideal scene with temples, ruins and mellow boscage, populated by figures out of Ovid's Metamorphoses or Vergil's Georgics--was still very much a part of French art. Its greatest exponents, Nicolas Poussin and Lorrain, were French, and their work still cast a long shadow. But it existed alongside a newer appetite for natural vision, the direct recording of the facts of landscape, whose wellhead...
...Volterra, the Citadel, 1834, a lively splotching of indeterminate dark scrub whose excited marks carry more visual weight than the distant hill town. But his early portraits are maladroit Ingres, and he was almost incapable of bringing off large biblical or literary compositions: his late painting of Dante and Vergil menaced by the she-wolf at the edge of the Dark Wood has to be one of the most bathetic illustrations for the Inferno ever made--not only the animals but the poets themselves look stuffed...