Word: vergil
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...Price. Small wonder. Berlioz was a genius of unbridled imagination who sought the impossible routinely and was willing to pay the price-neglect-to achieve it. Consider the bill of particulars for Les Troyens, based on Vergil's account of the wanderings of Aeneas before the founding of Rome...
...established. The hope was hopelessly ambiguous from the start. Auden was born in 1907 in Yorkshire and grew up near Birmingham. His father, who served as Birmingham's school medical officer, used to stud his lectures on such public-health needs as flush toilets with quotations from Vergil, a blending of the classical and clinical that often marked Auden's verse. But the elder Auden used to confide in his son that doctors never know why their patients get well. At Ox ford, from which he graduated in the late '20s, already a poet, Auden studied Freud...
NAPOLEON believed that any Augustus can create a Vergil; any man with sufficient money, he thought, can underwrite a poet to sing his praises. Napoleon also proved that his own thesis is wrong, for what poet created an epic about the Corsican dictator? What Bonaparte did not realize is that an emperor who would create a Vergil must have not only the wealth, but also the stature, of an Augustus. Great poetry can only be written about great topics, topics which are common and central to the experience of all mankind. Any lesser theme is doomed by its nature...
Cleopatra's last scenes owe a great deal to the death of Dido. Vergil showed how both love and duty are a calling on the soul. Aeneas provides the greatest example of self-mastery through moderation. He is great for leaving Dido; Antony for joining Cleopatra. In Vergil love is the divine demoniacal; in Shakespeare what is best is demonic and divine. For Cleopatra, as for Dido, rule and passionate love prove irreconcilable, as Charmian's farewell line "Your crown's awry" beautifully explains. Death for both women brings no diminution of majesty but its highest pitch. Cleopatra, like Dido...
...extra pressure on the federal budget; some federal agencies have hired outside historians at $50 a day. In proposing the project, however, the President has history on his side. Throughout time, kings, popes and potentates have decreed how they should be remembered. So why should Lyndon Johnson be denied? Vergil was financed by the Emperor Augustus while writing the Aeneid, and repaid his patron with lavish praise of Augustan virtues. Emperor Trajan was so taken by his triumphs, that to satisfy his pride he had 2,500 of his followers' names carved into a 137-ft.-high marble pillar...