This course is currently booked to capacity.
Virgil’s Aeneid
Three weeks: August 28, September 11 & 18, 2021
$250/person
No work of western literature except the Bible has been so influential as Virgil's Aeneid. It was once a centerpiece of a liberal arts education. Now it is almost never read. We'll spend all three weeks reading and discussing the Aeneid, which is the story of how Aeneas and a few Trojan refugees found their way from the ruined city to the Tiber River on the western side of Italy, and indirectly helped to found Rome.
The work has special value to us in the United States because in many regards its theme is "the cost of empire." What did it cost to Aeneas' humanity and his dream of living in peace to have to found Rome through savage wars. Virgil was asking his own Roman countrymen, at the time of the first Emperor Augustus Caesar, what has been the cost of Rome's magnificent success in the known world?
It's a marvelous book. It combines elements of Homer's Iliad and Homer's Odyssey into a single national epic for Rome. And Virgil uses all of the epic conventions (shield, invocation of the gods, visit to the underworld, etc.) to explore the burdens and glory of Roman history.
