The story of Aristaeus and his bees from Book 4 completes Pantheon Poets’ selection of extracts from the Georgics, Virgil’s epic poem about farming and the countryside: hear it in the original Latin and follow in English here. See the key to the selection with links to individual extracts here.
See the opening of the greatest English epic poem here, with links so you can compare it with its classical models, the Aeneid, Iliad and Odyssey. In the illustration by William Blake, an Archangel warns Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden. In the background, beyond the Tree of Knowledge, an elephant “wreathes his lithe proboscis” (Paradise Lost Book 4, line 347).
In one of his odes, Horace refers to the legend that Thetis, the mother of Achilles, hid him disguised as a girl in the household of King Lycomedes of Skyros to prevent him from going to his death in the Trojan war; but that Odysseus and Diomedes tricked him into revealing himself by making him think the palace was under attack (he grabbed a weapon).
Hear the poem in Horace’s original Latin and follow in English here.
Photo by Chappsnet, CC BY-SA 4.0 , via Wikimedia Commons
A little poem complaining at the grossness of sex and the dejection that can follow it is credibly ascribed to Gaius Petronius Arbiter, sometime favourite of the aesthete-Emperor Nero. It is better, says the poem, to stick to kissing. Hear this curious piece, which shares something of the outlook of the decadents of the late nineteenth century, and follow in English, here.
The illustration is an artist’s impression Petronius’s final moments as he died by an elaborate suicide after his fall from grace, in an illustration from Sienkiewicz’s novel, Quo Vadis?
Ovid vividly tells the tragic story of Phaethon, the son of the Sun God, Phoebus Apollo, who unwisely dared to try to drive his father’s fiery chariot across the sky.
Hear Ovid’s Latin and follow in English here, as Phaethon sets out on his doomed adventure.
To be continued …
Hear Ovid’s Latin and follow in English here.
In the illustration by Karl Bryullov, Apollo himself demonstrates how it should be done.