Word: virgil
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...Venerating Virgil Re "Virgil Goes Viral" [Jan. 22]: as a high school Latin student, I am thrilled to see the classics getting recognition in new translations, histories, biographies, movies and TV shows. While the classics have been a key part of "proper" education for centuries, they have been somewhat forgotten by our modern culture. The evidence of this negligence is seen in dwindling enrollment in classics courses and, most unfortunately, dwindling funding for classics programs and the students enrolled in them. The classics are a key to how our civilization was shaped. I hope that people remember all aspects...
...month, Minnesota Congressman Keith Ellison, the first Muslim elected to Congress, was sworn in as a member of the 110th on a copy of the Qur’an that belonged to none other than Thomas Jefferson (Why do you think the $2 bill was phased out?). Virginia Congressman Virgil Goode criticized Ellison’s oath as a threat to traditional American values and warned that more Muslims could (God forbid!) be elected unless America tightens its immigration laws...
...school, I loathed Latin, in general, but I detested Virgil in particular. After you'd spent hours wading through conjugations and declensions and ablative absolutes and gerunds and pasts perfect, imperfect and pluperfect, there was the pointless torture of learning and then reciting lines of dactylic hexameter about this bloke wandering aimlessly around the Mediterranean at the whim of a perpetually pissed-off goddess. I mean, even Milton was more fun than that...
...blood flows over his shapely limbs, his neck droops,/ sinking over a shoulder, limp as a crimson flower/ cut off by a passing plow." Fagles published terrific translations of The Iliad and The Odyssey a few years ago, so maybe I shouldn't have been gobsmacked by his Virgil. They're all quite popular too, part of a renewed passion for the classical world. The culture has lately offered up for mass consumption two new histories of the Peloponnesian War, a whacking great biography of Julius Caesar, a film on Alexander the Great (plus a book lauding his business strategy...
There's nothing especially venal about the ancients in this regard; nobody's perfect or ever was. The classical world knew crosshatching as much as bands of white and black; the Greeks and Romans had their moments of doubt. Here's Virgil's Aeneas in the underworld, catching sight of his erstwhile lover, Dido, Queen of Carthage, whom he had deserted as she climbed onto her funeral pyre: "Oh, dear god, was it I who caused your death?/ I swear by the stars, by the Powers on high ... I left your shores, my Queen, against my will ... Stay a moment...