/lit/ - Literature

1. It’s the Romans recreating their origin myth to link themselves to the Greeks mythological cycle
2. It’s in Latin
3. It’s unfinished
4. It’s a meme to hate on it for being fanfic. Fanfic is traditionally forbidden on /lit/ (but then so is Ayn Rand)

Here’s a pleasant addendum to the cycle from the west coast of America. Not in epic poetry, but she does it some justice

>>19539065
I love it, it's my favorite Greco-Roman work :)

The section about Aeneas in the underworld is so beautiful, I sort of believe that is what actually happens after death

>>19539113
Your opinion is not valued.

>>19539149
No one likes you.

>>19539149
BASED

>>19539149
This.
>>19539155
I like him.

bump. i was gonna read it soon but maybe i not waste my time?

>>19539065
News to me.
>>19540927
It's fucking great. Mytho-historical epic about a culture founding hero who survives the Bronze Age Collapse and goes on to found a city even greater than the one whose destruction he escaped?
Yes please.

>>19540927
You should read it alongside Catullus and Horace and Seneca, not alongside Homer and Hesiod. It won't make sense if you read it with Homer.

>>19539065
I had to read this in Latin for my Latin AP class in high school. If you read a translation you don’t get the full impact

>>19539065
It's a blatant ripoff of both Illiad and Odyssey, not surprising since the entire Roman mythology is slightly reworked Greek mythology.

>>19540954
Curious as to the implications of this post. Do you think readers need a companion for navigating ancient Greece and Rome beyond the texts? How do you make the jump from Homer to Vergil?

>>19541178
Jumping directly from Homer to Virgil (doing le epic) and maybe chasing it up with Dante after makes little sense. Read the rest of the Greeks first.

>>19539155
wrong i like him.
(You) on the other hand...

>>19541339
>you can't read Virgil until you've read literally everyone who came before him
Imagine being this person.

>>19542094
>you can't read Virgil until you've read literally everyone who came before him
Hello based departament?

>>19542415
shitposts aside i do want a segueway from greeks to romans...

>>19539113
>shilling le guin unironically
kys

>>19539155
pot calling the kettle black

>>19542468
What Greeks have you read?

>>19542094
Nothing wrong with reading a little philosophy and drama before you plunge into Virgil's tepid waters.

>>19541178
>How do you make the jump from Homer to Vergil?
Homer may be the greatest Greek author, but the Greek party's just getting started when he goes home. I'd read a little Plato, at least the Poetics of Aristotle, some tragedy and comedy. History if you want, it's fun. Then think about the Romans.

>>19542742
basic of basics
homer, hesiod, have books from sappho and sophocles on the shelf
afraid i will get filtered hard by philosophy and history desu.

>>19542794
>>19542859
forgot to link but here's a bump i guess

>>19542859
I see. Laser focus on poetry. I respect that. In that case, you want to dabble in some New Comedy (either Menander fragments or Terence/Plautus will do) and Hellenistic poetry (should be a good anthology out there) and you should be good for skipping to Virgil.

Acca is best girl

>>19542859
The reason for not skipping right from Homer to Virgil isn't just naked pedantry btw. Virgil is just a very different poet and if you don't have a little background in what he's trying to do he comes off a bit shit next to Homer.

>>19542943
>Hellenistic poetry (should be a good anthology out there)

There isn't really. Have to read Theocritus or Apollonius of Rhodes on their own.

>>19542985
>don’t have a little background in what he’s trying to do
What exactly is he trying to do, anon? That background is what I seek
>>19542943
>laser focus on poetry
By complete accident, lmao - do want to pick up the tragedies about Agamemnon by Aeschylus tho and try Herodotus since his work appears to be more accessible than Thucydides and worried I’m too brainlet for Aristotle/Socrates/Plato

>>19543086
>What exactly is he trying to do, anon? That background is what I seek

So Hellenistic Greek poetry, with poets like Callimachus, is airy, light, artificial, studied, erudite and mannered. The opposite of Homer just rattling off sublime hexameters one after another. Even when they write epic (and unlike Homer they WROTE epic) it's compact and learned, like the Argonautica.

That's the Greek tradition that held sway when Virgil and Horace et al were writing.

The problem was, how do you write a big popular national epic while not offending Callimachus's stylistic norms?

Virgil's schoolmasterish but deeply dark answer was the Aeneid. If you read it on those terms it's not the equal of Homer but it is something worthwhile.

>>19543226
Did this Callimachus have significant sway over Hellenistic Greek/Roman authors? Was he an aristocrat? When did this stylistic shift occur (though I should probably start asking this once I have more than Homer and Hesiod under my belt kek)

>>19539065
How does this epic compare to other epics? Is it on par with Homer? Better than the Italians?

>>19543226
>airy, light, artificial, studied, erudite and mannered.
>The opposite of Homer just rattling off sublime hexameters

Why are these things different? What makes a hexameter sublime? What makes a poem airy and light?

>>19543254
He didn't say hexameters were sublime, he said Homer was being sublime in hexameter

As there are knowledgeable people here - what is the recommended translation of Apollonius’s argonautica and how does it compare to Virgil and homer ?

>>19543254
If you compare Apollonius/Theocritus with Homer/Hesiod, you'll spot the difference in an instant. All four composed in hexameter btw.

>>19543238
>Did this Callimachus have significant sway over Hellenistic Greek/Roman authors? Was he an aristocrat? When did this stylistic shift occur

Yes, enormous sway.

He was a scholarch at the Library of Alexandria. But left behind few fragments. I believe the stylistic shift occurred in the 3rd century BC. It took a while for it to get to Rome though. Catullus was the first extant Latin author strongly influenced by Callimachus.

>>19543279
Richard Hunter's Oxford edition is amazing.

>>19543279
Oh, as for how good it is. Well, there's a reason it's so often overlooked. But it has a lot of interesting stuff in it!

>>19543333
Thank you for that I’ll take your quads as a portent for its worth.

I appreciate your input, additionally would you be able to recommend any good books on Heracles/? There doesn’t appear to be any straightforward ancient books on it

>>19543515
If you don't mind a little secondary literature, Emma Stafford's Routledge book is a pretty good overview of everything we know from the ancient evidence, and it's on lib gen.

>>19543226
>deeply dark answer

Can you elaborate on this?

>>19539065
it mogs homer

>>19543563
The later books are very violent. I know the iliad's probably more violent, but the way Virgil dwells on things it comes across as darker and more psychological in the Aeneid.

There used to be a whole stream of Aeneid criticism called the Harvard School that was all about how dark and pessimistic the poem was. I find mentions of it in google but not much useful to show you.

>>19543598
How comparable are the kills to the Iliad? I just finished it a few days ago, and the way peoples brains get blown out, or their heads taken clean off was ridiculous...

>>19543246
>Is it on par with Homer
no>>19543246
>Better than the Italians
yes

>>19543677
Why isn't it on par with Homer? What holds it back? I finished the Iliad, going to the Odyssey and Aeneid after (all Fagles). I'm told the Aeneid reads better than the Iliad by most people. A lot of the modernists (especially Pound and Eliot) love Virgil too

>>19543312
>you'll spot the difference in an instant.

Even in translation? I confess, all the ancients I've read sounded interchangeable, but I don't read Greek.

>>19542859
read plato's apology. it's comfy desu

>>19543719
Virgil's craft is on par with Homer if not better. If you read a translation you can't really get at this. The poem as whole is weaker compared to Iliad though in my opinion maybe because our knowledge of history and the politics of Virgil's age always seeps in to my understanding of the poem. Virgil was constrained in constructing the poem in ways that Homer wasn't.

>>19543887
This and the poem is unfinished.
>Virgil makes us readers. Homer makes us hearers

>>19543811
How so?
>>19543312
How did Callamachus have sway over the styles of other poets? Ancient analog to Chicago style citations beyond dreamed up and imposed?

>>19539155
Incorrect, I like that anon. I, however, do not like you.

>>19539421
>>19541347
>>19544182
Incorrect.

>>19543719
>all Fagles
explain yourself

>>19539065
Virgil got a patek on my wrists going nuts

>>19542859
not sure how to help you in regards to virgil, but I highly recommend the 5 dialogues of plato, a great gateway into plato.

>>19544264
how the fuck can you afford to post on /lit/ all day everyday?

>>19544758
I guess I’ll eventually give ol Plato a stab

I'm following this chart for the greeks, anyone here recommends supplementary works or different translations/editions ?

>>19544818
You’re an idiot

>>19544177
He just wrote poems that other poets liked a lot and laid down sick burns on his opponents.

>>19539065
Because they haven't read it.

>>19540962
It's not only a ripoff but also a retelling of it

>>19539065
From someone who's actually rred it in the original-
1. It's Latin hexameters. Latin is not meant for hexameters, which are natural for Greek in the same way iambs are in English. The natural Latin meter was Saturnians, which the Romans in their weebery abandoned so hard that we don't even know what the rules for it were. The problem is that trying to force Latin words into hexameters is difficult; they have to be inserted in essentially random orders in the sentence to fit them in the meter. Because of Latin's nature as a highly inflected language, the result CAN be understood in a way that it couldn't in English. But the result is still a hideous, cacophonous, tortured mess that's difficult to
Now, Homer DOES use hyperbaton. But he does so in moderation, sensibly. He does it for effect, and never becomes difficult to understand from it.
To be frank, this is a problem with all Latin poetry, not just Virgil, and even Latin prose does it to a far greater extent than does Greek.
2. It's irritatingly artificial.
Homer was telling traditional stories straightforwardly. He believed in what he sang, and correctly so, since everything he says is true.
Virgil, however, was not. He had little to no belief in the historical truth of his story, working as he was from various, almost certainly invented, traditions about Æneas- and felt no reason to not just invent most his own narrative. Compare his version to the version Livy recounts, for instance. Virgil in fact makes nods to other traditions- having Æneas just narrowly meet Odysseus, reflecting a version where the two founded Rome together. (In fact, Hesiod tells us Latinus was a descendant of Odysseus).
But the fact remains that Homer is a traditional story told straightforwardly. The Æneid is a willfully fabricated story (like most of the Arthurian corpus), and, worse, it's told in a rather odd way. On a cursory reading you won't notice this, but the poem is full of inconsistencies and ambiguities, and characters very often lie to each other about what has happened or will happen. This is clearly a deliberate effort on Virgil's part, not a mistake, and suggests a hidden plot and message in opposition to the surface one. This is a very rich field of study, and very interesting. However, this also means that's not an æsthetically pleasing story to read, at least for me.
Not to mention it's very melodramatic and overly filled with miracles that are unnatural, often including cliche poetic set pieces simply because other poets have done so. Homer's dialogue flows very naturally, it expresses the characters well and is dramatically effective. By contrast, Virgil's speeches are often melodramatic bits of rhetoric.
That said, it's still a fascinating work, and it is arguably the central work of the Western European literary tradtion. Keep in mind that Homer was unknown in the Latin Middle Ages, and Virgil remained far more well known for centuries even after that.

>>19542094
It’s less ‘read every work that came first’ & more ‘group what you read around a common theme.’ So read greek works together then read roman works together etc, it creates a more fulfilling experience.

>>19547319
Vergil's Latin is not very difficult. Idk why you think the poetry is all over the place when in reality a Ciceronian speech is far more difficult to piece together than the vast majority of the Aeneid. Perhaps you need to read some more difficult Latin poetry to really get a sense for how nicely Vergil's poetry fits together.

>>19547511
I agree that prose is even worse, but that doesn't make the poetry better.
For me it might be incrased by burnout of having to study a lot of dull Latin lyric in uni, and by having Homer to compare it with.
But either way, I hate it.

>>19547511
My point isn't that it's difficult in the sense of being actually trouble to read. I can read and understand it fine. It's just ugly and annoying.
I just hate the Roman style I suppose.

>>19547545
I get this. I prefer later Latin poetry and of course the rhythmic poetry too. But Vergil has his moments of poetic innovation.

>>19547537
I don't read Greek so sadly I can't compare. But I will say compared to the germanic traditions it took me a lot longer to enjoy Latin poetry. On fact it was Aldhelm's treatise on metre that got me to really enjoy earlier Latin poetry (I.e. Classical and pre Carolingian). I don't know if I would say the dactyl is especially ill suited for Latin as a metrical foot. But the hexameter does seem to extend the line beyond the more comfortable pentameters and distych poems produced in Latin.

>>19539065
If I found this boring will I find the Greeks boring? I also read it in prose so maybe that’s the problem. What’s the best verse translation to English.

>>19547319
Why do so many other poets praise Virgil for his verse then? Pound and Milton both adored Virgil for poetic skills.

>>19549062
I have no idea.
I don't like Milton much myself either.

>>19549376
Neither do I. But Pound and Milton were on extremes of the poetic spectrum (and Pound hated Milton), so I figured they were apt to compare. I can only read it in translation and I don't think its the equal of Homer, but its really close, and does its own unique thing extremely well.

>>19540960
Yeah I think every AP Latin class reads this

>>19548781
Dryden

>>19548781
If you’re bored by Homer you dont have a pulse