As the battle rages, Aeneas’s young friend, the Arcadian Prince Pallas, encounters the enemy chief, Turnus, and comes off second best. Hear Virgil’s Latin and follow in English here, and see the illustrated blog post here.
Aeneas’s enemy and rival, King Turnus, rages like a desperate wolf as he looks for a way into the Trojans’ camp. Hear Virgil’s story in Latin and follow in English here.
In the last poem of his first book of Odes, Horace celebrates with a drink in the shade of a closely tangled vine, served by a single slave. Both wear myrtle crowns for the occasion, chosen for their simplicity, as Horace stresses. The garland that the beautiful Antinous wears in this bust from the British Museum is of ivy, sacred to Bacchus/Dionysus.
Hear Horace’s poem in his original Latin and follow in English here.
A French poet, writing during the Renaissance, wants an example to illustrate how his travels have left him with an aching nostalgia for his home near the Loire. He finds two, and they come, not from his contemporary world, but from the myths of the Greeks and Romans – Odysseus, who had such a difficult journey home from the Trojan war, and Jason, who went to the edge of the known world to find the golden fleece.
Why does the poet, Joachim Du Bellay, turn as if by second nature to the ancient world for his material? Because, like most western poets and writers from the Renaissance up until the first half of the twentieth century, he was steeped in ancient Roman and Greek culture and literature, and fundamentally influenced by them. This creates a challenge if you want to know and understand “modern” European writers like Du Bellay. but, like all but a tiny minority in the UK today, you have never studied an ancient language or read any of the Latin and Greek classics in the original. One purpose of Pantheon Poets is to offer you a way to bridge this gap. Part of the difficulty is that ancient languages work in very different ways to modern ones, and rules governing how poetry was written are also very different and hard to convey in translation to a modern reader. So Pantheon Poets offers ancient poetry with the original text, an English translation and a recorded performance – as ancient poetry was most often composed with performance, rather than silent reading, in mind. Taken together, these offer a much more authentic encounter with great literature from the ancient world than that available purely from modern literary translations.
Hear Du Bellay’s poem “Heureux qui comme Ulysse”, one of the most beloved in the French language, in the original, and follow in English, here
This ode is addressed to one of Horace’s brother-poets, a love-elegist called Valgius. Read literally, it seems to urge Valgius to come to terms with the loss of a male lover, Mystes, but it may be more about the kind of poetry that Valgius has been writing than a real-life bereavement. “Mystes” is a Greek name and means someone who has been initiated into religious mysteries such as those practised at Eleusis in Greece. Hear Horace’s Latin and follow in English here.
The illustration is a 4th century BCE votive plaque from Eleusis showing a scene from the mysteries, photo George E. Koronaios, licensed under CC BY-SA 4.0 , via Wikimedia Commons.
In Thebes, royal sisters are refusing to join ceremonies celebrating Bacchus. They will come to regret this, but for now they pass the time by weaving, spinning and telling stories instead, including the one about Venus’s love-affair with Mars. Hear Ovid’s original Latin and follow in English here; see the illustrated blog post here.
In North Africa, fearing that fourteen of his ships may be lost, Aeneas is exploring the country. His mother Venus, disguised as a Phoenician girl, has told him the story of Queen Dido and now delivers good news about his missing ships and men by interpreting a sighting of swans as an oracle.
Hear the Latin and follow in English here.