Aeneas and Us

Claremont Review of Books ^ | 03/22/21 | Spencer Klavan

[PoliticallyShort]

When rioters topple statues of Abraham Lincoln, George Washington, and Christopher Columbus, they are saying as much about the present as they are about the past. We are in the midst of a violent struggle over what story we will tell about our origins, which will determine what view we take of ourselves. A national identity crisis of this kind can only be remedied—or exacerbated—by a national reckoning about our founding. Who were our forebears, and who are we?

Though perennial, these questions become particularly pressing in moments of civic uncertainty. In antiquity, one such moment—an important one for us to remember—came just after the fall of the Roman republic. It was then that a dazed citizenry struggled to reconcile the homespun virtue of its rural past with the sprawling majesty of its newborn empire and the bloody labor that had produced it. The Romans, like us, were nursing civic resentments of the kind that can unmake a people. As they labored to understand themselves, they reached into the myths of their distant past. The enduring product of that soul-searching was Virgil’s Aeneid, a monumental epic which has received not one but two new English translations over the past six months.

[ConservativeDude]

they are saying as much about the present as they are about the past. “

not really....they are only saying about the present...not about the past

[ConservativeDude]

working through this article....

“The Aeneid fascinated Dante and John Milton, Peter Paul Rubens and Gian Lorenzo Bernini, John Adams and T.S. Eliot.”

Also...CS Lewis did a partial translation of the Aeneid...FWIW

[Larry Lucido]

When you’re not posting old news, how about a donation?

An early ping for next month.

This is the FreeRepublic “1 of” Ping List. The FR “1 of” Ping List is comprised of folks who post hit and run clickbait threads and then rarely if ever reply to posts.

“1 of” Ping list members: Your donations are needed during the next FR Fund Raiser. FR members pay for you to post your hit and run threads for free. Your donations are needed to pay back FR members who pay for your free use of FR bandwidth.

Please donate here.

https://freerepublic.com/donate/

The “1 of” ping list is on my home page.

[ConservativeDude]

Lin Manuel-Miranda’s Hamilton (2015), for all its shortcomings as a historical document, manages to portray the revolution as a thrilling story of courage while still noting at a pivotal moment that freedom is a work in progress: “black and white soldiers wonder alike if this really means freedom,” says the solider John Laurens after the Continental Army’s victory at Yorktown. “Not yet,” says Washington. But Miranda’s work fundamentally insists that the birth of this country is worth praising and that nonwhite citizens should imagine themselves as protagonists of our founding story: it was the birth of their freedom, too, even if the maturation of that freedom was woefully delayed.”

That is very well said.

Also....it is an important body of data that many freedmen/women, once they became full citizens and took last names, many of them in fact took the names of American founders including Washington and Jefferson. Sam Houston’s former slaves, of course, took the name Houston.

Perhaps the story of slavery/freedom is a bit more nuanced than the left would like it to be

[Verginius Rufus]

In one of the oral histories of former slaves done during the Depression, a man who had been young in 1865 and did not have a surname chose the name Davis because he had heard people talking about Jefferson Davis all the time so he figured that Davis was a good name.

On a recent program about Thomas Jefferson on C-SPAN, the speaker mentioned a letter Jefferson received not long before his death from a free black man who had twin sons--he told Jefferson that he had named one of them Thomas and the other one Jefferson.

[Verginius Rufus]

Booker T. Washington was originally Booker Taliaferro—he chose to add “Washington” to his name.

[PerConPat]

LOL..Talk about coincidences...So did I in high school, 4th year Latin, as did thousands of other kids.

[Verginius Rufus]

When I took 4th year Latin in high school our teacher had us read Cicero's De Amicitia. I always found prose authors easier to read than poetry when it came to Latin and Greek authors.

[scrabblehack]

I wondered if this passage (Aeneid IV ll. 663-666) inspired the name Taliaferro - my Latin prof thought it didn’t.

dixerat, atque illam media inter talia ferro
conlapsam aspiciunt comites, ensemque cruore
spumantem sparsasque manus. it clamor ad alta
atria:

More later...

[PerConPat]

We didn't have enough kids that wanted third and fourth year, so juniors and seniors were in one class each year. One year we did Cicero's orations etc. and the Aeneid the next. The difficulties with poetry are the tropes, idioms etc... Translating poetry is a bear.

Latin was one of the best things I did in school.

[PerConPat]

Editing tag line...

[Verginius Rufus]

The Italian name is usually spelled Tagliaferro and the English with surname Taliaferro are said to be descendants of a man from Bergamo, Italy. George Wythe's wife was a Taliaferro and Thomas Jefferson did some research on the family during a trip to Italy. It is sometimes spelled Tolliver which is how the name is pronounced (at least in the US). I doubt there is any connection with Aeneid IV.663.

[SunkenCiv]

The writer had me with "Aeneas".