At the close of the civil wars, Virgil compares the city still to a chariot out of control and begs the gods to allow Augustus to be its saviour.
Hear Virgil’s Latin and follow in English here; see the illustrated blog post here.
Yeats shows classical and Byzantine influences in a poem that expresses sadness at growing old but asserts the power of mysticism and intellect. He may have had this 6th century portrait of the Byzantine Emperor Justinian I in mind when making his references to golden mosaics and drowsy Emperors. Read the poem here.
Psychology, Homeric slang and literary reference at a dinner from Proust’s masterpiece, the point being that, in those days (around 1890), every educated person knew something about the classics. Today things have changed, and one of the purposes of Pantheon Poets is to offer non-classicists a way to fill the gap.
Today’s new poem is a sonnet on this famous Florentine church with a plain exterior but a beautiful interior. Read it here.
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Today’s poem is taken from Schiller’s free German translation of Book 4 of the Aeneid, in which he describes how the Goddess Juno finally takes pity on Dido as she lingers in her death agony after stabbing herself with Aeneas’s sword and sends the rainbow-Goddess Iris to free her spirit from her body. Hear the German read by Tatjana Pisarski and follow an English translation here.
The great German poet Friedrich von Schiller wrote a thrilling free version of the Books of Virgil’s Aeneid which deal with the fall of Troy and the Story of Dido and Aeneas. This extract from the second – Book 4 – is Dido’s reproof to Aeneas when she discovers he has been planning to leave her. Listen to the German read by Tatjana Pisarski and follow an English translation here.
The illustration shows another famously and justly angry mythical woman – Medea – painted by Evelyn de Morgan.
See and hear passages from Schiller’s fine German version of Books 2 and 4 of the Aeneid, follow in English and compare with Virgil’s Latin original.