As Hercules sets sail in the bowl of Helios, enjoy this selection of Latin (and Greek) poems about travel, starting with the voyage and later retirement of Catullus’s brave little Continue Reading
Odysseus has foiled and blinded the Cyclops. From the frequency with which the blinding is shown in ancient art, from archaic Greek pots to grand sculptural groups made for Emperors, it was a tale that must have been universally known and loved as one of the greatest exploits of the heroes of legend. In the Odyssey, however, it also carries a much darker undertone. Not for the first time, it has been Odysseus’s outsize appetite for risk and his determination to meet the monster that put him and his men in danger in the first place. And by revealing his name to the Cyclops, and blasphemously mocking his father Poseidon’s inability to restore his sight, Odysseus has made another very big mistake. Poseidon has heard Polyphemus’s prayer that, if Odysseus is fated to come home, it should be with the loss of all his companions, on a ship that is not his own, and that he should find troubles in his house. Odysseus will soon find that curse beginning to come true as the Laestrygonians destroy eleven of his twelve ships with all their crews. He may come out on top in the end, but the Odyssey is as much the story of his disasters as his triumphs.
The illustration, by Arnold Böcklin, looks ahead to Odysseus’s long and lonely captivity on Calypso’s island.
Link to the story of the Cyclops in Homer’s Greek and follow in English here.
With the Greeks in the city, Aeneas gathers a desperate band of defenders as the final battle for Troy begins to unfold.
Hear Virgil’s Latin and follow in English here.
Looking for an example to show why wealth is not necessarily the key to happiness, Horace chooses Phraates, who was restored to the throne of Parthia in 25 BCE. The message is that the crown and authority of a king must always be uncertain: only the man who can maintain a philosophical indifference to such things can truly possess them.
The illustration shows a famous mosaic from Pompeii of Alexander the Great defeating King Darius, an earlier holder of the “throne of Cyrus” at the battle of Issus, some three centuries before Horace’s time.
Hear Horace’s Latin and follow in English here.
In Book 9 of Virgil’s Aeneid, Turnus, Aeneas’s enemy and the leader of the Rutuli, is shut inside his enemy’s camp. At first, the battle goes his way – but then the Trojan leaders begin to rally their forces. Hear Virgil’s original Latin and follow in English here.