Pantheon Poets continues to offer you a direct taste of spoken Latin poetry. You can follow the poems in the original whether you know Latin or not – you might for example be interested in later European writers and curious about what Latin influences meant to them. Today’s post is the final part of the story of Laocoon from Book 2 of Virgil’s Aeneid. He has warned the Trojans not to trust the wooden horse that the Greeks have left – he fears Greeks even when they bring gifts. Now, as fate and the Gods bring the fall of Troy ever closer, Laocoon pays a terrible price for his warning.
The next step on Pantheon poets in bringing spoken Latin poems by such greats as Virgil, Horace, Catullus and Ovid to Latin and non-Latin speakers alike, and throwing light on Latin influence on great European writers, will be one of the best bits of the Aeneid, as monstrous snakes lay Laocoon, the wise Trojan priest, low. Does this herald the fall of Troy? Will the Trojan Horse enter the city? Hear it recited in Latin, follow the Latin poetry in English translation. Watch this space as Aeneas continues to tell his tale to Queen Dido …
Today’s new poem is by Alfred, Lord Tennyson. It is a tribute to Virgil on the 1,900th anniversary of his death and is an example of how deeply great European writers have been steeped in and influenced by Latin poetry. One of the aims of Pantheon Poets is to give you a better experience of Latin poems recited in the original than translations can provide, even if you don’t know Latin yourself.
Today’s new Latin poem is from Virgil’s Aeneid. It sets the scene for Aeneas, as an honoured guest at the court of Dido, Queen of Carthage, to describe the fall of Troy. He is a Trojan prince, and the story he tells will be first-hand, vivid and full of drama, and a rarer subject in ancient literature than you might suppose – Homer’s Iliad ends before Troy falls. As Book 2 begins, Aeneas’s superhuman dignity and charisma are meant to remind us of his descendant, the Emperor Augustus.
Recent additions to the Latin poetry pages include the first of what will be quite a few extracts from the works of Ovid, the last of the Big Four – the others being Horace, Virgil and Catullus – to feature. If you want to know more about them, there is information and the Augustan age in which the last three wrote on the “About the Poets” page. The piece – “Ovid’s broad-minded advice to his mistress” – is from his Amores and exemplifies his enthusiasm for good, old-fashioned sex. Continue reading “Ovid and Horace’s different takes on love”
More than 2,000 years after Augustus banished him to deepest Romania, the poet Ovid has been rehabilitated.
Rome city council on Thursday unanimously approved a motion tabled by the populist M5S party to “repair the serious wrong” suffered by Ovid, thought of as one of the three canonical poets of Latin literature along with Virgil and Horace.
Best known for his 15-book epic narrative poem Metamorphoses and the elegy Ars Amatoria, or the Art of Love, Publius Ovidius Naso was exiled in 8 AD to Tomis, the ancient but remote Black Sea settlement now known as the Romanian port city of Constanța. Continue reading “Ovid’s exile revoked”
Quintus Horatius Flaccus, or simply Horace (65–8 B.C.), is often remembered and thought of as an intellectual and lover of both philosophy and poetry alike. While this remains true, it came to be that he eventually emerged through his works as an Epicurean. His works feature frequent elements from the Stoic, Peripatetic, and Platonic schools of thought; Epicureanism however is brought up more than twice as often in all of his works than the second most alluded to, Stoicism.
Today, Horace is most notably remembered for being the first of all Latin poets to express the famous aphorism carpe diem in the eleventh poem of the first book of his Odes (c. 23 BC). In its literal meaning, the phrase means to “pluck the day [as it is ripe],” or, in other words, to enjoy the moment. Continue reading “Horace and the Latin aphorism Carpe Diem”