![]() ![]() ![]() The passage was one of the most famous in “The Aeneid.” In Latin it reads, “Forsan et haec olim meminisse iuvabit.”įagles renders this line, “A joy it will be one day, perhaps, to remember even this.” Is it really pleasing to think about a traumatic event? A reason this line bedevils readers is because “please” is only one of the possible translations of iuvo. He got up, knelt on the carpet in front of his file cabinet and pulled out some pages. (Fagles) asked if it would be acceptable for him to read a passage that bedeviled him. In a 1997 New York Times interview, celebrated translator Robert Fagles singled out this line as one that “bedeviled” him: Not only is this line famous, it is also confusing. Even outside of Classics, the line has been widely referenced everywhere from articles about Pirates baseball to the Real Housewives of Beverly Hills. They reach dry land where Aeneas tries to lift their spirits, giving a speech in which he utters some of the most famous words in Latin, “forsan et haec olim meminisse iuvabit” (1.203). ( source)Īfter losing to the Greeks, fleeing their burning city, and wandering around the Mediterranean en route to fulfill their leader’s destiny of founding Rome, the Trojans endure a horrifying ordeal at sea. Morgan is a regular public speaker, on many aspects of Classics and Afghanistan, appears occasionally on BBC Radio 4, and writes slightly less occasionally for the Times Literary Supplement.When Aeneas (with swirled shield) recalls this moment, will it be with pleasure? (From Andreas Rumpf’s “Chalkidische Vasen,” from a lost Greek vase). He has made several visits to Afghanistan in recent years, and his most recent book, The Buddhas of Bamiyan (Profile Books and Harvard University Press, 2012), traces the history of these remarkable monuments from their Buddhist origins 1,400 years ago, through their celebrity in Islamic wonder literature and European travel writing, up until their destruction in 2001. ![]() ![]() The focus of most of his research is Roman literature and culture, and he is the author of the well-received study of Roman poetic form, Musa Pedestris: Metre and Meaning in Roman Verse (Oxford, 2010).īut he also has a longstanding fascination for Afghanistan, contemporary and historical, which he traces to his discovery, at an impressionable age, of a Russian samovar inscribed “Candahar 1881”. Llewelyn Morgan is a Classicist, a Fellow of Brasenose College, Oxford. In the final module, we turn from exploring broader themes and ideas to doing a bit of close reading-in this case, lines 390-6, a description of two twins who are killed by Pallas. After that, we turn to the presentation of Aeneas himself in Book 10-a highly ambiguous presentation that sees him engage in human sacrifice and be compared to the monster Aegaeon, but is he simply fulfilling his duty to Pallas? In the third module, we consider the presentation of some of the lesser figures of the poem-Pallas, Mezentius, Lausus and Turnus-before moving on in the fourth module to think about Italy and the status of Hercules. In the first module, we consider the council of gods that opens the books, a supremely impressive occasion, no doubt, but one in which precisely nothing is decided. In this course, Professor Llewelyn Morgan (University of Oxford) explores Book 10 of Virgil's Aeneid. ![]()
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