Summary
This week, the Professor continues his summer series on religion and epic poetry. "Now, I am warning you," I tell the undergraduates on the first day of class, "This is a very politically incorrect class. We"re going to be talking about sexism, imperialism, human slavery, violence and images of naked idols. If these topics bother you, then you need to take class about nice people. Of course, I do not condone any of these terrible things. But when you teach the history of ancient Rome, certain issues come up. And this is one of your textbooks." At this moment in the discussion I hold up "The Aeneid" of P. Vergilius Maro, commonly known as Virgil, who lived from 70 to 19 B.C. Along with the Bible and Shakespeare, it is one of the most influential books in the history of literature.
Unlike Homeric literature or "Gilgamesh," which were produced orally over a long period of time, "The Aeneid" was a composition by one man. At the end of the Roman civil war, shortly before the time of Christ, the emperor Octavian Caesar Augustus hired Virgil to write a poem to rival the great epic sagas of Greece to glorify the Roman state, and in the process glorify Caesar as well. Virgil's task was all the more difficult, because Augustus Caesar had ended five centuries of republican democracy and replaced it with a military monarchy, which is a hard feat to legitimize. Virgil accepted the commission for a million gold coins and spent the rest of his life writing poetry. He was almost done when he took ill and died, but before his death he ordered the manuscripts burned. Caesar intervened and the imperialist manuscript was saved for posterity. For the next four centuries of the Roman Empire it was the required study of all educated people, and it remained popular in the Middle Ages right down to the modern day.See the full content of this document
Extract
Even Virgil Penned Political Propaganda
To glorify the emperor, Virgil avoided tacky subjects such as Caesar's mass executions and proscriptions or Roman war fleets sending their fellow Romans down to the bottom of the sea. Instead, he wrote a poem of the founding of the Roman people in remote antiquity by the alleged ancestor of Augustus, Aeneas, the last surviving prince of Troy. To justify...
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