To do Classics! - the subject I love SO SO much… oh my gosh…
I finally did it, I finally made my dreams come true. I can finally release all the excitement and all the want that I made myself hold in and suppress because I didn’t want to tempt fate. And after my interview experience I wouldn’t even dare think about a future where I went to Cambridge. I was dealing with a lot of family issues at the time and my second interview was just a slow and painful death by Latin grammar, I remember sitting in silence for what felt like forever after logging off of that final zoom, just thinking I had thrown it all away over the ablative case. And I spent weeks thinking that. And I was wrong. And I have never been more happy to be wrong in my life.
the more I think about the Aeneid, the more I realise that when we look at it through modern eyes, it becomes a novel about so much more than the founding of a city. We follow characters who are truly traumatised by all that they have suffered, and a reluctant hero who craves his mother’s comfort - with the weight of his ancestors and his descendants on his shoulders. Despite his own personal trauma, Aeneas must carry on through all the suffering and loss, in order to fulfill his purpose. Despite loosing the most important person in her life, Dido must flee her own country and start up a new kingdom entirely alone, and of course be doomed to meet a tragic end, as all she has worked for falls apart. Despite having his future set out before him, Turnus must fight for all that he had previously deemed so certain, and eventually have it all taken from him, including his life. Surely as modern readers, these tales resonate with us in an entirely new and powerful manner - we can all relate to having to plough through trauma and tragedy despite our own emotions, to feeling alone, craving comfort, being thrown into uncertainty, loosing battles we thought we would win. And the beauty of the Aeneid is the sheer complexity of each one of the characters: hero through one eye, villain through another. It is more than a study of what it means to be roman, it is a study of what it means to be human.
Both the mortal and immortal women in the Aeneid are presented as fatally flawed in some regard. What with Dido’s furor, Juno’s pettiness and Camilla’s arrogance, all of Virgil’s women come across as tainted by the constrains and seemingly universal flaws of their sex. Based on this, it follows that Virgil himself was actually a mysoginist intent on ensuring that his audience understood that all women, even and especially those in positions of power, were inferior and incapable of fulfilling their duties and roles successfully. In this essay I will…
everybody in the dark academia community be thinking latin is all romantic when in reality its crying over irregular verbs and wondering why the same verb means ‘wear’ and ‘wage war’
“Qui autem civium rationem dicunt habendam, externorum negant, ii dirimunt communem humani generis societatem; qua sublata beneficientia, liberalitas, bonitas, iustitia funditus tollitur.”
—
Cicero
Those who claim that we must take care of our own citizens, and ignore foreigners, they break apart the universal harmony of humankind. And once that is gone, kindness, generosity, goodness, and justice are altogether destroyed.
