History-Makers: Virgil | Overly Sarcastic Productions Reaction

What up, HoBiscuits? It's your girl, Skitten, back at it again. First and foremost, I hope you guys are doing well. I hope you guys are staying safe and sanitized. Let me know down in the comments below what you guys plan on dressing up for for Halloween, assuming that you do plan on doing so. I am not trolling for costumes because I've known what I'm going to be for Halloween for like the past four and a half months, but you might be able to help somebody else out or you might be able to get some ideas. You never know. Maybe I could get an idea for next year. You never know. The girls and I will be dressing up as the Powerpuff Girls. I will naturally be Blossom. Dr. D will be Buttercup. And of course, Rice Spice, the sweetest of us all, will be Bubbles. So pretty excited about that. We've had it planned for a while. Dr. D might not be able to make it, but she will be with us in spirit. Anywho, then today we are here to watch some overly sarcastic productions. This video is a History Makers video, so you know it's going to be your boy Blue. And it's about Virgil. What I know about Virgil, he wrote the Aeneid and he was a big fan of Homer. That's what I know. So I'm excited to see what this video has in store for us. Without further ado, let's go ahead and get started. I think it's fair to say the Romans are not best known for their literature. And while that is frankly a shame, I can very much understand why. When an unstoppable train of legionaries comes battering down your door in their imperialistic quest to confiscate the entire Mediterranean Sea, you are unlikely to be focusing on the stylistic choices in their poetry. No amount of artistic alliteration would alleviate the absolute atrocities suffered by the people and kingdoms who found themselves the new beneficiaries of the Roman peace. And even during the subsequent Pax Romana, when life was at least nominally chill, most Romans engaged with their culture through the physical art and architecture that dominated civic spaces all throughout the empire. Very little Latin is necessary to understand that Marcus Agrippa made this big-ass template, as public megaworks have a conspicuous habit of speaking for themselves. But if Rome wanted to become more than a land of soldiers and engineers and ascribe some sense of purpose to its world-conquering-ness, it needed to start writing stuff. Now, by the time of the first Emperor Augustus, Greece had been hard at work for nearly a millennium, and their immense catalog of epics, poems, plays, and philosophies had become a core pillar of Roman culture. However, seeing as those were all written in Greek, the citizens were hungry for more literature in the Latin language. That's not to say the Romans didn't have a strong start in the 200s BC, as they came out of the gate with the invention of the sitcom by comedy playwrights like Plautus. For context, most of Shakespeare's comedies are adaptations of Plautus, and for further context, Roman comedy is absolutely hilarious. Things I never ******* knew. Literally things I didn't know the tidbit about Shakespeare, and I didn't even know that the Romans wrote comedies. Like, that's so interesting. This seemingly contrasts with the straight-laced stiff upper lip that we observe in Cicero's formal letters on politics and philosophy or in the utterly emotionless war commentaries by Caesar, but as soon as we expand our sample size beyond politicians, we observe, perhaps unsurprisingly, that the Romans were really quite expressive writers. Take the first century BC poet Catullus, whose verses painstakingly chronicled the emotional rollercoaster of his affair with an aristocratic woman. The poor lovebird probably felt more ecstasy and heartbreak in his 30-year lifespan than most people get in a century, and some of his poems would make even Sappho blush. I feel like I need to check out these poems. You feel me? Maybe we should do a video on Catullus's poems. Would y'all be into that? Would y'all be here for that? So the Romans clearly had poetry, and expressive poetry at that, defying the stereotype of the cold, unfeeling statesman, but there is one attribute that binds early Roman literature together and distinguishes it from the Greek. It's all concerned with what is. Family dynamics, politics, war, love affairs, all varied topics, but all part of the everyday world and deeply familiar to the Roman audience. And so enters Virgil, a poet perfectly timed to meet the new Roman world, or, perhaps, the Empire of Augustus was lucky to have dawned during Virgil's lifetime. It's hard to convey just how transformative Virgil's poetry was for Roman culture, but it's harder to imagine what Rome would have been like without him. With just three works in his lifetime, one of them unfinished, Virgil built on the foundati- The Aeneid is unfinished? God, I know nothing. Foundations of Greek literature stepped beyond the familiar world and created, in beautiful Latin, a comprehensive cultural identity for the Roman people. So, to see how this humble poet marks the high point of Latin literature and hard-carried the entire ethos of empire, let's do some history. Publius Virgilius Mato was born in 70 BC, just outside the northern Italian city of Mantua, and would have grown up in a republic that only knew chaos. Coming off of a decade of civil wars, with several more on the way once Caesar crossed the Rubicon in 49 BC, the prevailing attitudes in the mid-first century would have ranged from glum to outright doom. And Virgil, who all his life was terribly shy and frequently sick, wanted absolutely nothing to do with it. In his youth, he studied law, but once he got to Rome, he spoke in court exactly once and immediately decided to leave. His choice may have- I'm sorry, but that's ******* funny. He studied something, and then he, like, did it, and he was like, no, this is awful, I hate all of you, and I'm never coming back. This is garbage. I'm gonna go **** off and work in a ******* restaurant somewhere. That's funny. Got to Rome, he spoke in court exactly once and immediately decided to leave. Neat, I hate this. This choice may have also been influenced by the general Caesar recently being stabbed to death 23 times by the senate. Either way, good to leave, so Virgil hopped down to Naples to study Stoic philosophy, met the young poet Horace while he was there, and at that time began working on his first poetry collection, The Eclogues. Inspired by some earlier Greek work, this is a set of ten poems praising life in the countryside, where farmers talk about their land, young men bemoan unrequited love, singers compete with each other, and life is good. Well, at least it's supposed to be, as the poems are loosely set in the Greek wilderness of Arcadia, but there are some curiously modern inclusions, as those farmers in poem one are actually talking about how their lands just got confiscated. Ah, shall I ever in after time behold my native bounds, see many a harvest, hence with ravished eyes the lowly turf-roofed cot where I was king? These phallos trimmed so fair, some brutal soldier will possess these fields, an alien master. Ah, to what a pass has civil discord brought our hapless folk? Go, once happy flock, my she-goats, go! Never again shall I, stretched in green cave, behold you from afar, hang from the bushy rock. My songs are sung, never again will you with me to tend on clover flower or bitter willow's brows. Hashtag sad. See, though Virgil got out of Rome, politics marched on, sometimes literally, as Caesar's allies Octavian and Marcus Antonius waged a war against the assassins, and after their victory at the Battle of Philippi, Octavian paid off his armies with farmland seized from towns in Italy, of which Virgil's hometown was one. So the eclogues are establishing what will become a theme of the natural world under threat from disaster and political chaos. But all is not lost, as Eclogue 4 promises a golden age dawning with the arrival of a young boy. And depending on how you read that metaphor, it could be anyone from the child of Antony and Octavia, a metaphor for Virgil's poetry, or as later Romans believed, baby Jesus. Taken all together, the eclogues see Virgil refashioning Arcadia from a distant mythological land into contemporary Italy. Beauty, crisis, and all. He also took the leap of using the old Greek dactylic hexameter, the metrical structure of Homer's Iliad and Odyssey, but in Latin. He was not the first to do this, but he was the best, and the eclogues catapulted Virgil into literary stardom. A year after their publication in 38 BC, Virgil made friends with Gaius Macinus, patron of the arts and close associate of Caesar Octavian, now de facto ruler of the Western Mediterranean. In the following decades, Macinus would become the primary driver of Roman literature under the Augustan program, which is a flashy way to say minister of propaganda. But we're not there yet, because it's still 37 BC, and Virgil was just gifted a house on the Esquiline Hill in Rome, but he once again immediately left for the countryside. Absolute boss move. In the 30s BC, Virgil's private life of writing poetry out in the country once again ran parallel with the Roman Civil War, as Octavian vied with his former friend Antony for control of the Mediterranean world, culminating in the Battle of Actium in 32 BC. So two years later, Virgil presented Macinus and the triumphant Octavian with a poem about... farms. Specifically, it's an instruction manual for farming, growing trees, animal husbandry, and beekeeping, all written in and somehow actually really good. Just focus on what's important. I keep getting away with this. This collection, called the Georgics, echoed his early work's presentation of an ideal pastoral world threatened by natural and man-made crises, as disasters, storms, wars, and corruption all come to cause a ruckus at various points in the poem. Like the Eclogues, this work weaves ancient mythology in alongside very contemporary ideas and fears, but it also marks Virgil's first contribution to the Augustan program. Bees. Bitch. Let me explain. Bees are adorable, and they make delicious honey, but they are also an excellent model for organizing society. So Virgil's observations on beekeeping double as a guide for bringing Roman civilization back from the disorder of all those civil wars. It's like when Christians reference ants. I got it. You will note, kind viewer, that bees are recognized not only for their efficient teamwork, but also for the curious fact that they operate under a monarchy. Not as a tyrant, but in a reciprocal relationship as the patron guardian of the whole colony. This will become a very Augustan idea, and there's frankly a whole hives worth of philosophically nuanced bee content in Book 4 of the Georgics, and my ability to say that sentence with a straight face should be a testament to this man's insane skills. Because it's comparatively easy to make a good poem out of action and drama, but to make high art out of a gardening textbook is some real talent. It's essentially an almanac, yeah. Now with that said, for his next poem, Virgil did take on a tale of action and drama, and it is spectacular. So in the years after Actium, Octavian became Augustus, Rome became an empire, and Messina's circle of poets became the voice of Roman culture. To mark his achievement, Augustus went absolutely nuts on public works, but also wanted to portray his reign as the start of a new golden age. And to do that, Virgil looked backwards, to the earliest foundations of Roman history and of Greek literature, and those two threads converged on the Trojan War. Specifically, legend went that the Trojan prince Aeneas, son of the goddess Venus, escaped the burning city and somehow made it over to Italy, where his distant descendants Romulus and Remus would later found the city of Rome. And seeing as Augustus claims descent from Aeneas, Virgil could praise the emperor indirectly without writing him in as a Marius Sue. Keep in mind, this also gives Virgil cover to criticize the great print caps, because Aeneas represents Rome's best and worst attributes. He's written to be pious, dedicated, cold, stubborn, and rageful all at once. In practice, he's the full inversion of the cunning and charming Odysseus. That comparison is handy, because on paper, the Aeneid is a Romanized retread of the Iliad and Odyssey, but remember, the Georgics was a farming manual, so there's a lot more going on here than just Homer I.I.O. I.I.O. It's also really interesting, um, how they used a poet for this, um, and it's not like the only- obviously it's not the only time that this has happened. Something that I can think about specifically, um, I want to say it's either- it's Henry IV or the V, I think. I want to say, or it could- no, it actually might be the VII. It might be Henry VII, um, but like when the whole, um, War of the Roses was going on and everything, and you know, he ends up taking the crown, um, they completely rewrote history to basically make it so that he was a descendant of Arthur, so that they could help legitimize, um, his claim to the throne. So this is like a tactic that rulers have used for forever, you know, and it shows like how powerful media- and when I say media, I'm obviously not talking about like, you know, TMZ and Fox News and like all that shit. Like, I'm not talking about like media, but I'm talking about like art as a form of media, um, how influential art has always been and how art has always been by nature political. One of the greatest historical works, the Aeneid, was- was, um, created for political purposes. So that's why it's always so interesting when people are like, oh, you should stick to the art like, no, stick to art, not politics. Like, no, it's impossible. It is impossible to separate the two, okay? They are conjoined twins. To summarize the overplot, Aeneas washes up on the shores of Carthage, has a brief affair with Queen Dido until he's gently reminded about his cosmic destiny to find Italy and establish an empire. So he leaves, she dies mad about it, and Aeneas makes it to Italy, but has to fight a war about it with Prince Ternus of the Rutuli to cement his claim to Latium and also win the hand of Lavinia in marriage, which evidence suggests he sees exclusively as a business commitment. The plot in itself isn't groundbreaking, but it's the details and the style that elevate it into one of the best pieces of poetry in the world. For instance, as Aeneas is crossing the Aegean Sea, the one thing he brings with him are the Panates, which become the household gods specific to Roman religion. And when mourning the death of his father Anchises, he holds the very first Parentalia, a traditional Roman funerary festival. Aeneas leaving Troy and journeying towards Italy parallels the slow progression of becoming more Roman over the course of the epic, establishing a continuity between the ancient past and the new Augustan Golden Age. He's not just going to a place, he's creating a new identity, just as Virgil is creating a new identity for Rome by composing a distinctly Roman mythology. Aeneas, of course, serves as a vehicle for Augustan glory, specifically in the scenes where he goes into the underworld and sees Augustus at the head of a metaphorical Roman triumph, and later receives a shield forged by Vulcan, with Augustus' victory at Actium front and center, but his characterization and structural role make him into a singular symbol of Rome. His destiny is to found a civilization he'll never live to enjoy, but he does it anyway, because selflessness is the currency of Roman heroism, and that all begins in Aeneas. Now, just as the poem begins in media res with Aeneas caught in a storm at sea wishing he had died at Troy, mood, it also ends in the middle of the action, closing literally three lines after Aeneas kills his rival Ternus. Thing is, the Aeneid is unfinished. Several lines have incomplete meter, as Virgil died of a fever in 19 BC while traveling from Greece, and he wanted three more years to polish the poem, but all evidence indicates this abrupt climax was the intended ending, which is frankly a baller move on Virgil's part. When Aeneas saw Pallas's belt on Ternus's shoulder shining, memorial of the Dolorous story and of his own grief, the terrible savage rage rose up in him, and he said to Ternus, it is Pallas who makes you his sacrifice, it is Pallas who drives this home, and saying this he ripped open the breast of Ternus, and Ternus's bones went chilled and slack, and his life with a groaning shudder indignant fled away to the shades below. That's ******* baller. Less cash money of him was his request that the unfinished poem be burned, maybe as a cover for his criticisms of Augustus, maybe because he was that much of a perfectionist, but literally everyone up to and including the emperor stepped in to ensure the poem was published, which seems like the return of the sack of Troy, Aeneas and Dido's, let's call it, wedding in the cave, Dido's silence in the underworld, and Aeneas grieving over the death of his battle companion, the epic far transcends any mere asset flip of Homeric material. In fact, Virgil's deliberately composed poetry is far more robust than the rigid and formulaic Greek that was passed down through ancient oral traditions. Virgil's Latin is varied and ornate and dynamic and it makes me want to learn Latin again, which is by far the best compliment I can give him. There are, rightly, mountains of scholarship on Virgil, because he's such an essential presence in Roman culture, Augustus doesn't work without Virgil in his corner, and I dare say there is no empire without the Aeneid. Now go read it. Okay, all right. Thank you so much for watching. I could have easily made this video triple the length because Virgil slaps harder than a Roman legion armed with paddle boards, but I, like Aeneas, am demonstrating selfless heroism. And we appreciate it. And vanity. Anyhow, Virgil is best boy and you should all for real read the Aeneid. I've linked the David Ferry translation in the description below and I will see you in the next video. Peace out! I super enjoyed that video. Like I said, what I know knew for sure about Virgil was that he wrote the Aeneid and that it was essentially a retelling of the Odyssey slash the Iliad. So I'm glad to have been proven wrong. I will go ahead and eat my words. Okay, sorry. I'm sorry. But I just I think it was so fascinating. And I just think it's so interesting how rulers have always used storytellers to establish their own legitimacy. Like I just think it's so interesting. I do wonder why he was like, nah, burn that shit. It's over. It's over. But I'm glad that it didn't work. I'm glad it didn't work out. Because like it was unfinished. But like, was it really? Was it? Was it really? Was it really unfinished? A first draft is a first draft. Your first completed draft is technically a completed story. You feel me? Like, that's all I gotta say. Anyway, I hope you guys enjoyed the video. Don't forget to leave your reaction requests and recommendations down in the comments below. And other than that, peace out ho biscuits. It's skit and lit.