Hannah Sorenson’s Reviews > The Norton Book of Classical Literature > Status Update

The Vision of Rome's Future
^they came
To places of delight, to green park land,
Where souls take ease amid the Blessed Groves.
Wider expanses of high air endow
Each vista with a wealth of light. Souls here
Possess their own familiar sun and stars.^

Palinurus
^Virgil, a perfectionist if ever there was one (he took seven years to produce the 2,000 lines of the Georgics), told his friend Varius to destroy the manuscript. Augustus, however, who had heard Virgil reading from the finished portions of it, ordered that it be preserved and published.^

The Passion of the Queen
^The man by Jove's command held fast his eyes
And fought down the emotion in his heart.^

The Death of Priam
^What was the fate of Priam, you may ask.
Seeing his city captive, seeing his own
Royal portals rent apart, his enemies
In the inner rooms, the old man uselessly
Put on his shoulders, shaking with old age,
Armor unused for years, belted a sword on,
And made for the massed enemy to die.^

Prologue
^For years
They wandered as their destiny drove them on
From one sea to the next: so hard and huge
A task it was to found the Roman people.^

Reading Virgil's works

—Georgics
1. Orpheus and Eurydice

—The Aeneid
1. Prologue
2. Book I—Aeneas at Carthage
3. Book II—The Death of Priam
4. Book IV—The Passion of the Queen
5. Book V—Palinurus
6. Book VI—Entry Into the Lower World
7. Dido's Ghost
8. The Vision of Rome's Future
9. Book XII—The Future of Italy

Book II
^Love is a frenzy, and it has no limit;
no love, if it is true, is ever done.^

Book I
^Many have been the men who were glad
to die in the extremity of length of love:^

Propertius
^Love, in Propertius, is no light matter. His Eros is not the pretty boy of Apollonius, but a demonic power that enslaves him. Yet his celebration of love's dominion over him is often combined with visions of death,^

The Fall of the Monarchy
^My body only has been violated. My heart is innocent, and death will be my witness.^