Aeneas : Trojan prince, son of Anchises & Aphrodite who, after the fall of Troy escaped to Italy with his aged father; his descendants founded Rome.
... great strength in Aeneas and sent him to face The raging son of Peleus. Assuming the form And voice of Priam's son Lycaon, Apollo, Son of Zeus, spoke thus to the counselor of Trojans: "Aeneas, where now are the brags you made to the princes Of Troy when you, over wine, declared yourself ready To fight man to man with Peleus' son Achilles?" To which Aeneas: "Lycaon, why would... heard this, he went alone through the fight Mid a tumult of hurtling spears till he came to Aeneas And famous Achilles. Quickly he covered the eyes Of Peleus' son with mist, then drew from the shield Of Aeneas the sharp ashen spear. This he laid down At the feet of Achilles, but Aeneas he swept from the ground And sent him vaulting high over the heads of numerous Heroes... Into Aeneas, and he, the people's shepherd, Strode out through the front line of fighters, his bronze helmet flashing. Nor was the son of Anchises unnoticed by Hera As out he went through the moil* of men to face The son of Peleus. Calling her friends about her, The goddess spoke thus: "Poseidon, Athena, you two Consider what we should do now. Here comes Aeneas, ...
... aptness of this metrical movement is rivalled by a line at almost the close of Ilion. There it is Aeneas who is spoken of, called out to attend the assembly planned by Deiphobus for hearing the secret message which Talthybius bears. There it is three spondees in succession, representing the movement of Aeneas' s powerful body filled with heavy brooding on high matters — and then the three consecutive trochees... with a threat for its prelude and yet the same lifting musical breath is in them as at its strongest renders Olympian the words with which Thrasymachus greets Aeneas with the news that Deiphobus has sent him: Hero Aeneas, swift be thy stride to the Ilian hill-top. Dardanid, haste! for the gods are at work; they have risen with the morning, Each from his starry couch, and... trochees, showing an easier and more self-possessed yet still resolute pace: Fate-weighed up Troys slope strode musing strong Aeneas. Sri Aurobindo is expert at wedding his metrical rhythm no less than his language to the substance of his thought. The physical and the psychological are also a unity with him or else they run suggestively parallel as when 1. Cf. Troilus and Cressida ...
... Strong Aeneas armoured and mantled, leonine striding, Came, Anchises' son; for the dawn had not found him reposing, But in the night he had left his couch and the clasp of Creüsa, Rising from sleep at the call of his spirit that turned to the waters Prompted by Fate and his mother who guided him, white Aphrodite. Still with the impulse of speed Thrasymachus greeted Aeneas: "Hero Aeneas, swift... gold Aphrodite." But to Aeneas answered the tranquil lips of Creüsa: "So may it be that I go before thee, seeing, Aeneas, Over my dying eyes thy lips bend down for the parting. Blissfullest end is this for a woman here mid earth's sorrows; Afterwards there we hope that the hands shall join which were parted." So she spoke, not knowing the gods: but Aeneas departing Clasped his father's... on the morrow gaze on the empty beaches of Troas." Troubled and joyless, nought replying to warlike Aeneas Long Anchises sat unmoving, silent, sombre, Gazing into his soul with eyes that were closed to the sunlight. "Prosper, Aeneas," slowly he answered him, "son of a goddess, Prosper, Aeneas; and if for Troy some doom is preparing, Suffer always the will of the gods with a piety constant. Only ...
... concludes with the death and funeral rites of Hector. The subsequent history of the Trojan War may be pieced together from references in other poems of olden times. The Wooden Horse episode is narrated by Aeneas to Dido in the Aeneid. The interval between Hector's death and the burning of Troy was filled with the achievements Page 53 of Memnon and Penthesilea, the treacherous killing... centre of the action is the issue between Penthesilea and Achilles and the issue is not concluded in Book FX, which is itself extant only as a fragment. In the first Book of the Aeneid, Virgil makes Aeneas recall, among other episodes of the Trojan War: ...Penthesilea leading the crescent shields of The Amazons and storming through the melee like a fire, Her bare breast thrusting out... of lying low and secret preparation. Laocon and Paris, however, counsel defiance as Moloch does in Paradise Lost, and so the die is cast. There are partings on the eve of the battle—Anchises and Aeneas, Antenor and Halamus, Paris and Helen, Paris and Cassandra. Meanwhile Achilles has learned of the rejection of his offer and decides upon instant battle. There is a parallel assembly of the Greek ...
... Strong Aeneas armoured and mantled, leonine striding, Came, Anchises' son; for the dawn had not found him reposing, But in the night he had left his couch and the clasp of Creusa, Rising from sleep at the call of his spirit that turned to the waters Prompted by Fate and his mother who guided him, white Aphrodite. Page 394 Still with the impulse of speed Thrasymachus greeted Aeneas: "Hero... prelude. Yet will we hear thee. Arise who are fleetest of foot in the gateway,— Thou, Thrasymachus, haste. Let the domes of the mansion of Ilus Wake to the bruit of the Hellene challenge. Summon Aeneas." Even as the word sank back into stillness, doffing his mantle Started to run at the bidding a swift-footed youth of the Trojans First in the race and the battle, Thrasymachus son of Aretes. He... Measuring Fate with his thoughts in the troubled vasts of his spirit, Back through the stir of the city returned to the house of his fathers, Taming his mighty stride to the pace infirm of the Argive. Aeneas But with the god in his feet Thrasymachus rapidly running Came to the halls in the youth of the wonderful city by Ilus Built for the joy of the eye; for he rested from war and, triumphant, Reigned ...
... greatest Trojans, Aeneas, comments: "That is why no mortal can fight Achilles... at every foray one of the gods goes with him, beating back his own death. Even without that power his spear flies, straight to the mark, never stops; not till it bores clean through some fighter's flesh." The gods, too, have complimentary words to say about Achilles. Poseidon advises Aeneas not to fight against... fight. His goddess-mother Thetis persuades the divine smithy, Page 49 Hephaestus, to forge for him new arms and a mighty shield. (XIX) Achilles is reconciled with Agamemnon, (XX) engages Aeneas, and is about to kill him when Poseidon rescues him. (XXI) Achilles slaughters a host of Trojans. The gods take up the fight: Athena lays Ares low with a stone, and when Aphrodite, going for a soldier... (painting by Tiepolo) enter. The Greeks stormed the city killing many of the men and capturing the women and children. Priam was stabbed to death by Achilles' son. The only Trojan hero to escape was Aeneas, who later, according to legend, went on to found Rome. The princes of Greece sailed away, each with a share of the spoils, but many did not have a joyful homecoming. Some were ship-wrecked or ...
... wonderful significance in all English renderings I have come across. Virgil is relating how his hero Aeneas and the faithful friend Achates, after suffering shipwreck, arrive on the African shore and wander up to a temple and chance upon a frieze of engravings in which scenes of the tale of Troy are depicted. Aeneas is greatly moved by this discovery and raises a moan in which not a single English translator ...
... In some respects, Camoens's epic is the most rewarding of the three. Like Dante, Camoens too—though with different results —acknowledges Virgil as his master. If Virgil sang of arms and the man, Aeneas, Camoens sang too of arms and the men—the men who carved out the Portuguese Empire and won the gorgeous East for Christ: The deeds I tell of are real, and far outstrip the fabled adventures... Roupinho, for whom alone I wish I had the lyre of Homer. The twelve knights Magrico led to England are more than a match for the paladins of France, the illustrious Vasco da Gama for Aeneas himself. 16 It is clear Camoens is anxious to make out a case for his heroes as against the heroes celebrated by Ariosto and Virgil. But what is of particular significance in Os Lusiadas ...
... Trojan senator. He had a liaison with Mount Ida and Aeneas was born. Anchises was forbidden to speak of the liaison, but boasted of it to his friends. As a result he was according to different versions either blinded or lamed (in Ilion, he is shown as blind). After the fall of Troy, he was taken away by Aeneas to Italy, where he died. Aphrodite (4th century BC) ... Aegis: attribute of Zeus and, later, Athene; it is represented variously as a goatskin cloak, breastplate or shield, often bordered with flames or serpents, and possessing supernatural power. Aeneas, son of Anchises and the goddess Aphrodite. He is one of the leading Trojan princes, belonging to the younger branch of the royal house. In Ilion allusion is made to the legend of his escape from... that gathered around the severed genital organ of Uranus when his son Cronus, the Titan, mutilated him. She instigated the abduction of Helen by Paris; in the war which resulted, she aids her son Aeneas and the Trojans. Apollo: Greek god of music, poetry, archery and prophecy, son of Zeus and Latona; originally a god of the sun and mystic illumination (see also his epithets Phoebus and ...
... Odysseus Theme In a perceptive essay on 'The Odyssey and the Western World', George de E Lord has tried to delineate Odysseus as a middle term between the Achilles of the Iliad and the Aeneas of Virgil's poem. Between Hamlet, father, the old-world heroic hero who smote the sledded Polacks on the ice, and Horatio the self-poised humanist who is not passion's slave, Shakespeare places Hamlet... both his father's son and the scholar from Wittenberg. 52 At the risk of oversimplification, it may be said that heroes like Achilles (and Turnus in the Aeneid) fight for personal glory, while Aeneas is able to look beyond himself, and the present, and fight for a cause, and for a future. For a heroic poem, the Aeneid astonishes us by its sudden spiritual insights as, for example, in: ... Odysseus begins as a heroic hero not unlike Achilles or Turnus, his wanderings school him in adversity, give a new dimension to his understanding, and gradually change him into a humane hero not unlike Aeneas. In a way, the turning point in his life is his being cast on the shore of peaceful Phaeacia and meeting the naive and chaste Nausicaa. When he narrates his adventures, and more particularly when ...
... foreground is played the shattering last act of the Trojan War. The women - Helen, Hecuba, Cassandra, Polyxena, Creusa, Briseis - are carefully delineated. The Trojan heroes are mythic figures, and of them Aeneas alone stands apart - he is the hope of the future. For the rest, the chieftains and warriors are so many, on the field of the battle there are advances and retreats, there are alarms and diversions... vulnerable heel with Apollo's connivance, and the Greeks practise deceit and enter Troy the same night and set fire to it. All this is prefigured in Cassandra's prophecies and Briseis' visions and Aeneas' dream. Thus his prophetic sister to Paris about Achilles: * See also Sethna, Sri Aurobindo - The Poet, pp. 319ff. Page 643 Yes, he shall fall and his slayer too shall perish... her chamber and cries in her pain: Troy shall fall in her sin and her virtues shall not protect her... Woe is me, woe for the flame that approaches the house of my fathers! 94 Aeneas dreams that Ilion's streets are on fire and foemen are around him, and Briseis sees thrice a bow releasing an arrow that strikes Achilles' heel.95 And Cassandra sees "centuries slain by a single day ...
... of the hills | with the ranges silent beyond her Watching the dawn in their giant companies, | as since the ages First began | they had watched her, | upbearing Time on their summits.... "Hero Aeneas, swift be thy stride to the Ilian hill-top. Dardanid, haste! for the gods are at work; they have risen with the morning, Each from his starry couch, and they labour. Doom, we can see it, Glows on... trochaic or a wholly spondaic line can be admitted when it is demanded by the action, e.g., He from the carven couch upreared his giant stature or, Fate-weighed up Troy's slope strode musing strong Aeneas. ...
... Syria and Lebanon, they developed important trading centres in various parts of the Mediterranean, the most important being Carthage in North Africa. In the Aeneid, the Latin poet Virgil tells how Aeneas, guided by his mother, the great goddess Aphrodite, leaves Troy in flames, with his family and other Trojan refugees, and after many adventures, finds refuge in Carthage where he meets Dido, the great... Virgil (70 BC-19 BC) who has for centuries been acknowledged as the greatest Roman poet, used the Iliad and the Odyssey as the basis for his great epic, the Aeneid, in which he glorifies Rome. Aeneas has been always considered the heroic ancestor whose descendants would one day found this beautiful city. 2. The Dorians: coming down from the North through Illyria and Thessaly, the Dorians ...
... the armies Marching swift to the shock. It beheld the might of Achilles Helmed and armed, knew all the craft in the brain of Odysseus, Saw Deiphobus stern in his car and the fates of Aeneas, Greece of her heroes empty, Troy enringed by her slayers, Pans a setting star and the beauty of Penthesilea. These things he saw delighted; the heart that contains all our ages ... the Troad she hastened thrilling the earth-gods. There with ambrosial secrecy veiled, admiring the heroes Strong and beautiful, might of the warring and glory of armour, Over her son Aeneas she stood, his guard in the battle. But in the courts divine the Thunderer spoke mid his children: "Thou for a day and a night and another day and a nightfall, White Aphrodite, prevail; ...
... 11 Collected Poem, SABCL, Vol. 5, p. 392. Page 248 down to the present day. Troy will turn down the offer; Achilles will join the fray, reduce the city to rack and ruin; Aeneas, the man of destiny, will set sail from Troy to found Latium and the Latin race and thus lay the foundations of the Roman Empire and the modem European civilisation. All this chain of events will ...
... and a yogin seeking to attain and to express the highest truth—for that too was an unrealised trend of his consciousness in that life. Perhaps before he had been a warrior or ruler doing deeds like Aeneas or Augustus before he sang them. And so on—on this side or that the central being develops a new character, a new personality, grows, develops, passes through all kinds of terrestrial experience. ...
... which Sri Aurobindo too has translated in passing, while helping a disciple Page 309 in the art of the caesura. Virgil, in the midst of describing a storm and the wreck of the ships of Aeneas, breaks into a line of universal appeal, the soul of all humanity speaking poignantly and profoundly: O passi graviora! dabit deus his quoque finem. Lewis gets something of the poignancy ...
... though their expressive power is immense. Where in their works do we meet a teeming world like that of the Shakes-pearean plays? Milton has his fallen archangel Satan coming alive, and Virgil his heroic Aeneas and his tragic Dido — but most of the other characters are a little wooden. Among those who have just missed entering the third row are the Roman Lucretius, the Greek Euripides, the Spanish Calderon ...
... doom and ruin of Troy at the hands of Greeks appears to be the plan of the poem. At dawn, the proposal of Achilles is conveyed through his messenger to the leaders of Troy, including Deiphobus, Aeneas, Paris, Penthesilia and Priam; the proposal is rejected in the morning by Troy's assembled chieftains; there is then the call to arms and the narration of partings of the Trojan leaders, including ...
... forget in toto. There is a world-encompassing, stupendous and prodigious effort standing erect before our vision, before the eyes of the world. The city of Rome and the goddess Juno and the hero Aeneas are mere symbols and excuses to express a great universal truth. In a parallel manner, the epics of Dante and Milton have specifically dealt with the Christian ideas. To us, modern intellectuals ...
... and a Yogin seeking to attain and to express the highest truth - for that too was an unrealised trend of his consciousness in that life. Perhaps before he had been a warrior or ruler doing deeds like Aeneas or Augustus before he sang them. And so on - on this side or that Page 58 the central being develops a new character, a new personality, grows, develops, passes ...
... felicity beyond. Virgil's O passi graviora, dabit deus his quoque finem.... ...forsan et haec olim meminisse iuvabit is only incidentally connected with the storm and wreck of the ships of Aeneas; its appeal is separate and universal and for all time; it is again the human soul that is speaking moved by a greater and deeper inspiration of cosmic feeling with the thought only as a mould into ...
... and a Yogin seeking to attain and to express the highest truth—for that too was an unrealised trend of his consciousness in that life. Perhaps before he had been a warrior or ruler doing deeds like Aeneas or Augustus before he sang them. And so on—on this side or that the central being develops a new character, a new personality, grows, develops, passes through all kinds of terrestrial experience. ...
... example I gave in my last letter I would particularly add his treatment of the line which Arnold Bennett considered the most rhythmical in all poetic literature - the phrase Virgil put in the mouth of Aeneas when that hero voiced his helplessness before Dido's request for the story of Troy: Infandum. regina, jubes renovare dolorem. Day Lewis converts this mournful magic into: O queen, the griefs ...
... a yogin seeking to attain and to express the highest truth —for that too was an unrealised trend of his consciousness in that life. Perhaps before he had been a warrior or ruler doing deeds like Aeneas or Augustus before he sang them. And so on—on this side or that the central being develops a new character, a new personality, grows, develops, passes through all kinds of terrestrial experience ...
... to be hailed as "a Human Comedy in several dimensions and many voices", 50 an evolving epic of a cosmos still in a process of becoming. "It is as though", writes Roy Harvey Pearce, "Odysseus, or Aeneas, or Beowulf, or Mio Cid, or even Dante, under the persona of Adam (in whose fall/we sinned all) had been compelled, out of some dark necessity, to write his own history, and in writing it, to ...
... Paradisal peaks via the slopes of Purgatory, which is, "closely similar to similar supernatural peregrination stories in Arabic and in old Persian literature—to say nothing of the descents of Ulysses and Aeneas", 109 to say nothing again of the wanderings of Rama, Sita and Lakshmana in the Ramayana and of the Pandavas in the Mahabharata. Aswapati's spiritual peregrination, described at considerable length ...
... all these do not add up to a rounded play. The House of Brut is even more of a fragment than The Maid in the Mill, for a ! solitary scene (II.i) alone has survived. The legendary Brutus (Aeneas' grandson) delivered the displaced Trojans from their captivity in Greece, and took them to Page 153 the far-off island, named after him Britain, to establish a new Troy there. Sri ...
... true climax here. Page 243 Perhaps the greatest master of climactic Melopoeia is Virgil. According to Arnold Bennett, the most marvellously rhythmed line in all poetic literature is Aeneas's gesture of helplessness when Queen Dido of Carthage asks him for the story of Troy: Infandum, regina, jubes renovare dolorem. The ring of profound pathos in these Latin vocables is as ...
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