Poets From Rome

"Orandum est ut sit mens sana in corpore sano."

"Nam qui dabat olim imperium, fasces, legiones, omnia, nunc se continet atque duas tantum res anxius optat, panem et circenses."

"Cantabit vacuus coram latrone viator."

"Quanto delphinis ballaena Britannica maior."

"Nam si tibi sidera cessant, nil faciet longi mensura incognita nervi, quamvis te nudum spumanti Virro labello viderit et blandae adsidue densaeque tabellae sollicitent, autos gar ephelketai andra kinaidos."

"Summum crede nefas animam praeferre pudori et propter vitam vivendi perdere causas."

"Nobilitas sola est atque unica virtus."

"Sed quis custodiet ipsos custodes?"

"Nunc patimur longae pacis mala, saevior armis luxuria incubuit victumque ulciscitur orbem."

"Hoc volo, sic jubeo, sit pro ratione voluntas."

"Vitam impendere vero."

"Nemo malus felix."

"The question is not put how far extends His piety, but what he yearly spends; Quick, to the business; how he lives and eats; How largely gives; how splendidly he treats; How many thousand acres feed his sheep; What are his rents; what servants does he keep? The account is soon cast up; the judges rate Our credit in the court by our estate."

"Hic vivimus ambitiosa paupertate omnes."

"Haut facile emergunt quorum virtutibus opstat res angusta domi."

"Nil habet infelix paupertas durius in se, quam quod ridiculos homines facit."

"Virgil imitated Homer, but imitated him as a rival, not as a disciple."

"At every step I have seen how impossible it is to translate Virgil, especially his unequaled blend of grandeur and accessibility..., of eloquence and action, heroics and humanity."

"Virgil is too important to be left to the classicists."

"Virgil's influence on English literature has been enormous. He was Edmund Spenser's constant inspiration for the fanciful beauty of The Faerie Queene. The Aeneid was the model for John Milton's Paradise Lost not only in epic structure and machinery but also in style and diction. In the English Augustan age, John Dryden and countless others held that Virgil's poetry had reached the ultimate perfection of form and ethical content. There was some reaction against him in the Romantic period, but the Victorians, such as Matthew Arnold and Alfred, Lord Tennyson, rediscovered in full measure that sensitivity and pathos that the Romantics had complained that Virgil lacked."

"For Virgil all war is mad and one cannot conduct oneself morally on the battlefield."

"Like every human being, a poet has to deal with three questions: how, what for, and in the name of what to live. The Bucolics, the Georgics and the Aeneid answer all three, and these answers apply equally to the Emperor and to his subjects, to antiquity as well as to our times. The modern reader may use Virgil in the same way that Dante used him in his passage through Hell and Purgatory: as a guide."

"Homer is a world; Virgil, a style."

"Virgil's narrative style...is subjective or more accurately, empathetic-sympathetic. Virgil not only reads the minds of his characters; he constantly communicates to us his own reactions to them and to their behaviour."

"Why Virgil's poems have for the last two thousand years exercised so great an influence on our Western culture is, paradoxically, because he was a renegade to the true Muse. His pliability; his subservience; his narrowness; his denial of that stubborn imaginative freedom which the true poets who preceded him had prized; his perfect lack of originality, courage, humour, or even animal spirits: these were the negative qualities which first commended him to government circles and have kept him in public favour ever since. [...] Few poets have brought such discredit as Virgil on their sacred calling."

"No, Virgil, no: Not even the first of the Romans can learn His Roman history in the future tense, Not even to serve your political turn; Hindsight as foresight makes no sense."

"...in the sense in which a poet is a philosopher … Virgil is the greatest philosopher of ancient Rome. ...Virgil was, among all authors of classical antiquity, one for whom the world made sense, for whom it had order and dignity, and for whom, as for no one before his time except the Hebrew prophets, history had meaning."

"Virgil, among classical Latin poets or prose writers, is uniquely near to Christianity."

"I think that he had few illusions and that he saw clearly both sides of every question—the case for the loser as well as the case for the winner."

"[Aeneas] is the symbol of Rome; and, as Aeneas is to Rome, so is ancient Rome to Europe. Thus Virgil acquires the centrality of the unique classic; he is at the centre of European civilisation, in a position which no other poet can share or usurp. The Roman Empire and the Latin language were not any empire and any language, but an empire and a language with a unique destiny in relation to ourselves, and the poet in whom that Empire and that language came to consciousness and expression is a poet of unique destiny. [...] No modern language can hope to produce a classic, in the sense in which I have called Virgil a classic. Our classic, the classic of all Europe, is Virgil."

"With Virgil European poetry grows up."

"Does [Aeneas] really resemble Odysseus at any point? No—there is no greater difference within the whole compass of ancient literature; and to understand that is to see how absurd are those critics who would dismiss Virgil contemptuously as a mere plagiarist and imitator of Homer. There is no more profound or astonishing originality in all the literature of antiquity than Virgil's; and that precisely because it operates within the limits imposed by the inherited and traditional forms, which it reverently observes."

"But it is to beauty that, like Dante, one returns as the final fact and feature of his style. Under Virgil's verbal sorcery, Latin becomes a golden language of exquisite richness, veined with a delicate melancholy and wistful reverie upon the abundant travail of life. If his wealth of tremulous pities and mystic dreams do not make true poetry, then poetry was never written."

"[Virgil] borrows royally from nearly every older master of style. Yet the result, if a mosaic, at least remains clear, beautiful, even harmonious, in its general design and effect."

"The use which the grammarians made of Vergil is so extensive that, if all the MSS. of him had been lost, it would be possible from the notices given us by the ancients of the Vergilian poems, and the passages quoted from them by the grammarians alone, to reconstruct practically the whole of the Bucolics, the Georgics, and the Aeneid."

"Then the soul of Virgil seems To awaken from its dreams, To sing again the melodies Of which he often tells,— The music of the birds, The lowing of the herds, The tinkling of the bells."

"He who in the days of yore Sang of pastures, sang of farms, Sang of heroes and their arms, Sang of passion, sang of war."

"Of all that [Homer] knew he sang, but Virgil could only follow and imitate, with a pale antiquarian interest, the things that were alive for Homer."

"Hundreds of Virgil's lines are for most of us familiar quotations, which linger in our memory, and round which our literary associations cluster and hang, just as religious feeling clings to well-known texts or passages of Scripture."

"I salute thee, Mantovano, I that loved thee since my day began, Wielder of the stateliest measure ever moulded by the lips of man."

"Sound for ever of Imperial Rome."

"Thou that seest Universal Nature moved by Universal Mind; Thou majestic in thy sadness at the doubtful doom of human kind."

"Thou that singest wheat and woodland, tilth and vineyard, hive and horse and herd; All the charm of all the Muses often flowering in a lonely word."

"Roman Virgil, thou that singest Ilion's lofty temples robed in fire."

"My lord, you know what Virgil sings— Woman is various and most mutable."

"His single words and phrases, his pathetic half-lines giving utterance, are as the voice of Nature herself, to that pain and weariness, yet hope of better things, which is the experience of her children in every time."

"He writes passionately, because he feels keenly; forcibly, because he conceives vividly; he sees too clearly to be vague; he is too serious to be otiose; he can analyze his subject, and therefore he is rich; he embraces it as a whole and in its parts, and therefore he is consistent; he has a firm hold of it, and therefore he is luminous. When his imagination wells up, it overflows in ornament; when his heart is touched, it thrills along his verse. He always has the right word for the right idea, and never a word too much. If he is brief, it is because few words suffice; when he is lavish of them, still each word has its mark, and aids, not embarrasses, the vigorous march of his elocution. He expresses what all feel, but all cannot say; and his sayings pass into proverbs among his people, and his phrases become household words and idioms of their daily speech, which is tesselated with the rich fragments of his language, as we see in foreign lands the marbles of Roman grandeur worked into the walls and pavements of modern palaces. Such pre-eminently is Shakespeare among ourselves; such pre-eminently Virgil among the Latins; such in their degree are all those writers who in every nation go by the name of Classics."

"Over the whole of the great poem of Virgil, over the whole Æneid, there rests an ineffable melancholy: not a rigid, a moody gloom, like the melancholy of Lucretius; no, a sweet, a touching sadness, but still a sadness; a melancholy which is at once a source of charm in the poem, and a testimony to its incompleteness. Virgil, as Niebuhr has well said, expressed no affected self-disparagement, but the haunting, the irresistible self-dissatisfaction of his heart, when he desired on his deathbed that his poem might be destroyed. A man of the most delicate genius, the most rich learning, but of weak health, of the most sensitive nature, in a great and overwhelming world; conscious, at heart, of his inadequacy for the thorough spiritual mastery of that world and its interpretation in a work of art; conscious of this inadequacy—the one inadequacy, the one weak place in the mighty Roman nature! This suffering, this graceful-minded, this finely-gifted man is the most beautiful, the most attractive figure in literary history; but he is not the adequate interpreter of the great period of Rome."

"Le poète de la latinité tout entière."

"Unless one is a moron, one always dies unsure of one's own value and that of one's works. Virgil himself, as he lay dying, wanted the Aeneid burned."