In the throne room of Carthage, Queen Dido gives audience to an embassy from Aeneas’s Trojans, unaware that he himself is present and about to be revealed.
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Image: Betty Blythe as the Queen of Sheba, Fox Film Corporation 1921.
Aeneas is destined to begin a love affair which will have disastrous consequences with Dido, the Queen of the new Phoenician city of Carthage, which she is in the process of building on the North African coast. Now his mother the Goddess Venus, in human disguise, tells him why Dido was forced to leave her homeland.
The fresco of Venus arising from the waves is from Pompeii.
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Close to the beginning of the Aeneid, Virgil explains why his hero Aeneas, in spite of his virtues and qualities, faces the implacable enmity of Juno, the Queen of the Gods. It is clear from the start that Aeneas is destined to succeed in settling in Italy and laying the foundations for a people who will become the founders of Rome, but Juno is a powerful enemy, and Virgil makes it clear that great ordeals and years of wandering lie between him and success.
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On Horace’s Sabine farm, unmolested by her brutal urban boyfriend, Tyndaris sings of Penelope and Circe among the peace and joys of the countryside.
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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.
In detached mood, Horace takes a look at the predicament of a once-popular courtesan who has begun to lose her looks, and with them, the attention of the virile young lovers she craves. The illustration is a Roman funerary portrait from the second century CE.
Hear Horace’s original Latin and follow in English translation here.
Maybe ten years after the publication of his great three first books of Odes in 2023 BCE, Horace finds himself unexpectedly, and perhaps unwillingly, returning to the genre. He has been invited by Augustus to do so as a contribution to the glory of the new, but now very well established, imperial system, and invitations from that quarter are hard to refuse. The purpose of the second Ode in Horace’s new, fourth, book is primarily to celebrate Augustus by looking forward to a victory over a troublesome German tribe, the Sygambri, but he also takes the opportunity to put on record his critical appreciation of another great poet, Pindar. That, rather than dutifully fulsome praise of the Emperor, is what primarily makes this an attractive poem to a modern readership. Nevertheless, it is a good example of how the imperial regime approached establishing and augmenting its prestige through the arts, and the metre, singing and dancing along in Sapphics, make the piece attractive to listen to throughout. The triumph in the illustration is Caesar’s, one of a series painted by the Renaissance master, Mantegna. now in the royal collection at Hampton Court.
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Are the Olympian Gods – if they exist – too remote to take an interest in human affairs, as the followers of the Philosopher Epicurus thought? An awe-inspiring natural event causes Horace to think again about his beliefs. Hear Horace’s Latin and follow in English here.
In this wall painting from Herculaneum, Zeus and Hera celebrate their marriage; see photo credits for licensing details.
In Ovid’s Metamorphoses there is often a sharp contrast between the elegance and charm of his style and the grim stories he tells. Book six, for example, has a sequence of episodes showing that it is unwise to cross either the Goddess Latona or Apollo and Artemis, her twin children by Jupiter. For performing flawlessly in a weaving contest against Artemis, Arachne has been turned into a spider. For belittling Latona’s divinity and her prowess as a mother, Niobe has been turned to stone by grief, having seen her fourteen children killed by Apollo and Artemis, and her husband, Amphion, die by suicide. In a grimly comic touch, an onlooker then tells the story of a group of peasants who were turned into frogs by Latona for denying her water. Now another recalls, almost in passing, the forfeit paid by the satyr and master aulos-player Marsyas for losing a musical contest: Apollo, the winner, skinned him alive.
‘quid me mihi detrahis?’ inquit;
‘a! piget, a! non est’ clamabat ‘tibia tanti!’
clamanti cutis est summos direpta per artus,
nec quicquam nisi vulnus erat; cruor undique manat …
“Why are you pulling me apart?” he cries, “Aaah! I wish I hadn’t done it! Aaah! No flute is worth as much as this!” he yelled. And as he did so, his skin was ripped off past the ends of his limbs and he was nothing but one big wound, and everywhere the blood flows … ”
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