“Muse, let the memories spill through me.” 

This is the line that drew me in to The Aeneid, Frederick Ahl’s translation. It’s the classic invocation of divine assistance that you find at the beginning of an epic, where the author sets out the grand scope of the task and asks for help. I had listened to the poem on audiobook just to enjoy the words and rhythm. I then picked through a translation from 1697 but felt that something was missing from its archaic language.

By accident I found the above line in a commentary comparing translations of the first passage. And it drew me in immediately.

The following blog post is about what this book, and this reading of it, means to me.

How I found this book

I first heard of Virgil, The Aeneid’s author, when I read with difficulty the Inferno of Dante when I was 15 years old. It was sitting on my parents’ bookshelf. Dante portrays Virgil as his guide and mentor through Hell, which he must pass through in order to get to Purgatory and then Heaven. For 15 or 20 years, Virgil loomed in my imagination as a towering intellect from ancient times who had left his mark on the subsequent millennia. Yet there was sadness and wistfulness to his story in the Inferno, since he could serve as a guide and mentor but not enter heaven. He was a wise shade but not a living character. And there was sadness in his actual biography since he died relatively young.

I picked up the Fitzgerald translation and it sat on my shelf for years, untouched.

Later I found a character in one of my favorite books (The Magic Mountain) revered Virgil. The character (Settembrini) even got provoked into a little spat when his intellectual adversary made a jab at the Latin poet.

I later read about how the Aeneid was one of the most important books in western literature for over 2000 years. What book written today will still be widely read and studied 2000 years from now?

I learned about how the first half of it corresponds to the Iliad of Homer (a story of warfare), and the second half corresponds to the Odyssey (a story of a soldier’s homecoming). This indicates its grand ambition, to continue and echo a revered poet from the rival civilization of the Greeks. This ambition is condensed in those first lines, “Arms and the man I sing…”

All this had me dancing around the book without cracking it open directly and seeing what it has to offer.

The personal allure of epics

Epics have a special allure for me. The grand ambition, the wide scope, the elevated language, and the desire of the author to link the story he tells to the greater cosmos can be captivating.

Yet the allusive or allegorical style and the language can keep even interested readers away. I tended to read the first “book” of each epic and then, satisfied that this was the best part, put it down. I got around this, and fed my completionist tendencies, by listening to audiobooks. First I listened to the Iliad, then the Odyssey, then the Aeneid, then the full Divine Comedy, and then Paradise Lost and Paradise Regained. And finally I listened to an abridged version of the Bhagavad Gita (with commentary to help me make sense of it). But only the Aeneid, and only this translation, really drew me in.

The translator tells of his love of the poem

In his translator’s note he writes:

“Yet although the immediate popularity of the Aeneid was certainly fostered by the model it offered to the sons of the elite as future leaders, the epic would not have absorbed and kept the interest of even disillusioned generations like our own if it had not been rich with both moral and aesthetic complexity, with depth of implications and beauty of expression.”

“What makes such an apparently hopeless labour worthwhile for me is an irrational love of the poem which drives me to want to convince others about its magnificence. That is why I, like many before me, have spent years trying to produce an exciting, readable, and performable translation that is intelligible to listeners as well as readers, one that might catch and hold the attention of even the reader in a hurry, despite the fact that it refuses to simplify the text. I wanted it to be a version that the literary minded could appreciate, but which would not play fast and loose with the original to win approval. On the contrary, I tried to stay close enough to the original for a struggling Latin student, if necessary, to be able to use it as a crib.”

In every passage I can see the thoughtfulness, the love of the text, and the painstaking care put forth by the translator. In his footnotes he frequently describes the decision making process he went through in selecting one word or phrase instead of another. He describes tradeoffs and concessions. And he helpfully explains the many allusions and references that would baffle the modern reader.

“The epic should be allowed to speak, in so far as a translation can achieve this goal, for itself. English, with its vastly larger vocabulary than Latin in most areas, allows one to generate distinctions Roman writers had no means of expressing, and to justify changes in the original by using the dictionary shrewdly.”

“Virgil rarely presents us with a consistently binary opposition between right and wrong, truth and falsehood, reality and illusion. His is more the world of paradox, of multiple and apparently conflicting simultaneous realities which often flare in unexpected ways as different planes of meaning intersect. Wherever I sensed the text leading me in different directions at the same time, I have left the reader the ambiguity or contradiction Virgil left me.”

My reading of The Aeneid is linked with my own self-discovery

2020 was the year that I named and addressed my anxiety head-on. The book is linked in my mind with courageous work on the psyche that I have done. In particular, it is linked to acceptance and commitment therapy, or ACT. 

A metaphor in my workbook struck me: 

“To be willing and accepting means noticing that you are the sky, not the clouds; the ocean, not the waves. It means noticing that you are large enough to contain all of your experiences, just as the sky can contain any cloud and the ocean any wave.”

There is no feeling, thought, sensation or memory that is intolerable because as the moment passes, I have already tolerated and accepted it. And what I reflexively view as “intolerable” is actually a fear about the next moment, or an ill-defined moment that is far in the future.

I learned about turning off the “struggle switch,” about dropping the rope in the futile game of tug-of-war, about not turning away from the richness of experience, about being willing and eager to feel everything life has to offer.

My psychologist once painted a vivid image of a battle. He asked me how much easier it would be to ignore the battle if it was not near me, but a mile away.

ACT is about not just diagnostic labels, but psychological pain. It’s about how avoidance only worsens the pain and its importance and turns it into suffering. It spells out clearly about how innate human problem-solving abilities and human language skills are counterproductive in addressing this suffering.

I noted in the Aeneid how the hero eventually faces his fate after a long journey and a long war, which was spelled out in the first lines. As part of the program I clearly mapped out my values and learned to accept pain as part of living a vibrant, engaged life and getting to something important.

I did a CTRL+F on the Dryden translation and found 26 instances of “anxious.” The author saw no contradiction in letting his heroes, gods and supporting characters feel and express this difficult emotion. As my workbook states, “Anxiety is a normal response… The problem is that we can bring these consequences into the current situation at any moment through verbal relations.”

This and other observations in ACT opened me up to mindfulness practice, to becoming an emotion scientist and an observer of my own thoughts, feelings, sensations and memories. It opened me to the realization that there are much better things to do with each moment than trying to regulate its psychological content. It opened me to acceptance, without defense, instead of effortful (and futile) control.

Although these tales of war captivate me, I am now awakened to the idea of stepping off the field of battle entirely, and of no longer being at war with myself.

Amazingly, in the footnotes of Ahl’s translation I found an explicit link to the willingness component of ACT: the Roman Stoic saying that “Fate leads the willing and drags the unwilling.” It came in the context of this passage:

“What does divine anger, when it is strong, portend of the future? What does fate’s sequence of causes demand? She gave him the answers. He touched Aeneas’s lonely thoughts with words bringing comfort: ‘Child of a goddess, let’s follow where fate drags us, onwards or backwards. Each turn of fortune we meet, we survive, and defeat, by endurance. Help does exist.”

This reading is connected with a time and a place

When you read a long, dense book, it becomes linked with who you are and where you are at the time you read it.

I read this epic over the course of several weeks in the height of the global covid pandemic. I worked at a mediocre job I’ve put up with for far too long. I saw one friend fade away while my relationship with another blossomed. I took cannabis and read the poem. And once or twice I took LSD and went on long, 15 mile hikes through Forest Park and downtown Portland, Oregon while masked against the virus. Lines from the epic turned in my head again and again and became linked to unexpected parts of my life and to the things and people I saw that day.

On one of these long walks I mounted the Saint John’s Bridge on a morning when it was draped in flowing mists only to the level of the roadway. I was crossing to reach the Ridge Trail. As I climbed the gentle slope upward I felt the illusion of being accompanied by the souls of my fathers. This was an echo of a passage from the book that must have been working within me to have appeared with such vividness at that moment. And so this green-painted steel bridge, this sensation of ghostly connection with my ancestors, and that damp morning in December 2020, will be part of my memories forever.

There are many descriptions and metaphors of nature and living things

Mountain ash, oaks, bulls, lions, deer, rivers, oceans, skies, bees, doves and the stars, moon and sun are present everywhere. This fits with Virgil’s two major previous works, which were pastoral in subject. These works (Eclogues and Georgics) are referenced by the translator frequently in the footnotes. The way Romans viewed signs from birds, the luck that bees bring, etc. is well-explained and helps you understand the text.

The most terrifying character is Allecto

“Her name comes from Gk. allektos, “unstoppable,” ‘insatiable,” (Latin insaturabilis). She is the essence of Juno’s determination, capable (unlike the gods) of sustained focus on a project and of interconnected strategies of action. Though she may be Virgil’s invention, she has characteristics of a traditional Greek Erinys (Fury), and operates mostly by insinuating herself into people’s minds.”

“From the grip of the shadows below, from the home of the Demons, she summons Allecto, the bringer of grief, whose delight is in dismal war and in anger, betrayal, and damaging criminal charges. Pluto, her own father, loathes her, her sisters in Tartarus loathe her; she, even there, is a monster, transforming herself into countless faces and  vicious expressions, and darkly erupting with serpents.”

“You have names by the thousand, a thousand artistic methods of hurting the world. So shake down the fruits of your bosom, scatter the sheaves of this peace, sow grievances leading to warfare. Make youths want, demand, reach for their weapons in one single instant!”

“There people point out the sight of a spine-chilling cavern where brutal Dis breathes out, where a whirlpool enlarged by the Acheron’s upward thrust yawns open its toxic jaws. It was through these the Fury, shocking the eyesight, plunged, thus lightening the earth and the heavens.”

Passages I flagged

The famous first lines:

“Arms and the man I sing of Troy, who first from its seashores, Italy-bound, fate’s refugee, arrived at Lavinia’s Coastlands. How he was battered about over land, over high deep Seas by the powers above! Savage Juno’s anger remembered Him, and he suffered profoundly in war to establish a city, Settle his gods into Latium, making this land of the Latins Future home to the Elders of Alba and Rome’s mighty ramparts. Muse, let the memories spill through me. What divine will was wounded, What deep hurt made the queen of the gods thrust a famously righteous Man into so many spirals of chance to face so many labours? Anger so great: can it really reside in the spirits of heaven?”

Passages I flagged:

“This was the time when sleep’s first wave sweeps over our mortal frailty, and gods’ most agreeable gift slithers into our beings.”

“When she’d said this, though I wept and so wanted to utter so many words, she deserted me, fading away on the winds without substance. three times i tried to encircle her neck with my arms as i stood there, three times, alas, all in vain. For the image eluded my grasping hands, like a slight puff of air, as a dream flutters off from a dreamer.”

“”I’m Polydorus, and spiked into me was a seeding of iron weapons which sprouted and yielded a harvest of sharp-pointed spear-shafts.’ Fear then assumed a more complex face. mind crushed by the portent, stunned, hair standing on end, voice caught in my throat, i stood stock-still.”

“next we bring bowls full of warm, frothing milk, bear chalices holding blood from the sacrificed beasts, and we settle the soul of the dead man deep in his tomb while our voices blare Last Call at the graveside. Then, just as soon as the main can be trusted, and winds give us lake-smooth waters, and rustling softness of south winds summons us seaward, sailors begin to haul ships to the surf, fanning over the beaches. out of the harbour we sail, and the cities and land are receding.”

“What a year of destruction! People let go of the sweet breath of life or they dragged ailing bodies painfully.”

“There in a grove by the stream of a make-believe Simois, she held rites of remembrance, with food for the dead, sad gifts, and libations, calling on hector’s empty tomb that she’d hallowed with green turf, and upon altars, twinned, like the cause of her tears: son and husband.”

“Does he still grieve now for his lost mother, and does his father’s fame, does Aeneas inspire him to old-fashioned courage, a real man’s greatness of soul, does the thought that his uncle was Hector inspire him?”

“Alas, you were saved from such perils for nothing. This was a grief neither helenus, seer as he was, in his many forecasts of horror, predicted to me, nor did fearsome Celaeno. This was my hardest test, the decisive turn on a long road. Then a god drove me clear off the course, to your people and your shores.”

“Dido and Troy’s chief come down together inside the same cavern. Earth gives the sign that the rites have begun, as does juno, the nuptial sponsor. The torches are lightning, the shrewd sky’s brilliance is witness, hymns for the wedding are howling moans of the nymphs upon high peaks.”

“My hope, if righteous forces prevail, is that, out on some mid-sea reefs, you’ll drink retribution in deep draughts, often invoking dido’s name. When I’m absent, I’ll chase you with dark fire! When cold death snaps away body from soul, evil man, my dank ghost will haunt you. My destination is yours. There’ll be no impunity. You’’ll pay. Tireless rumour will come to my buried remains. I will hear her.”

“Such was the pounding of voices, this way and that way, the hero underwent ceaselessly; He, in his great heart, felt all the anguish. But, in his mind, he remained unmoved; tears flood, but are wasted.”

“Using a mixture of honey and sleep-bringing opium poppy, she, with the right spells, claims she can liberate minds when she chooses, but that, in others, her power can induce intractable anguish.”

“Death-doomed, she calls upon gods and the fate-telling stars to bear witness, prays to a power that is just (if there is one), a power that remembers, whose jurisdiction embraces all lovers with one-sided contracts.”

“No love must ever exist between our two people, no treaties. Rise from my bones, my avenger – and there will be an avenger! – so you can hound these dardan settlers with hot fire and cold steel, now or some day in the future, whenever that strength coalesces.”

“Juno almighty pitied her difficult death with its painful anguish long drawn out, and dispatched to her, down from Olympus, iris, to unmoor her struggling soul from the limbs’ web of bondage. Dido was dying a death that was neither deserved nor predestined, but premature: a poor woman, swept up by the quick fire of madness. So, as Proserpina hadn’t yet taken the locks of her golden tresses, and thereby consigned her being to Stygian Orcus, Iris, rosy with dew, skimmed down through the sky upon crocus wings. And her wake, as she passed by the sun, traced colors in thousands. Standing by dido’s head, she spoke: ‘i take, as instructed, locks consecrated to Dis. i untether your self from your body.’ then, as her right hand severed the hair, all warmth escaped dido; and as it did, life fluttered away from her into the breezes.”

“Nautes, an elder, broke in at this point. Pallas, god of tritonis, made him her one student, bringing him fame for his deep skill and learning. What does divine anger, when it is strong, portend for the future? What does fate’s sequence of causes demand? She gave him the answers.”

“Now the same mothers, the same men who saw, only recently, brutal harshness etched in the face of the deep, and who hated to hear sea mentioned, were ready to go, and endure all the struggles of exile.”

“You’re telling me not to monitor salt sea’s mood when there’s no swell, when it appears to be calm? You want me to trust ominous stillness? Why should I now be untrusting Aeneas to treacherous breezes and to the skies? I’ve so often been tricked by delusory calmness!”

“He was my journey’s companion, he sailed every seaway beside me, constantly bore every menace the deep and the heavens inflicted. He wasn’t strong – yet his vigor surpassed what is normal in old age.”

“He’s propelling his skiff with a pole, trimming canvas sails as he ferries the bodies across in his iron-girt vessel, elderly now – but there’s fresh green sap in his elderly godhood.”

“Instantly voices are heard: massed wailing, the weeping of children: souls never able to speak, just over the boundary’s threshold, stolen by death’s dark day, ripped away from the breasts of their mothers, plunged in the grave’s bitter sourness without any share of the sweetness life brings.”

“Innocent folk who despaired are their neighbors: people whose own hands birthed their own deaths in disgust at the world’s light, cast away living souls. How they’d long to get back now beneath sky’s limitless, open brightness, and suffer in poverty, tolerate gruelling labours! Heaven forbids it; and that grim lake’s unlovable waters bind them; the spiralling Styx loop ninefold moats of constriction.”

“It was no choice of my will, good queen, to withdraw from your country. Rather, commands of the gods, which now compel me to pass through ghost-shadows, regions vile with decay, night’s oceans of darkness, drove me with power supreme. And I couldn’t believe I was bringing grief so intense, so painful to you, when I made my departure.”

“I heard rumours, that final night: people said you’d collapsed on a mountain of intertwined corpses, worn out by killing Pelasgians during an orgy of slaughter.”

“She, in their midst, was brandishing fires that could ruin a nation, calling Danaans forth from the citadel’s crest.”

“Here there are clusters of men who were wounded defending their country, priests who kept chastity’s vows intact through the course of their lifetimes, poets and seers who were righteous and spoke words worthy of Phoebus, all who enriched human life with the arts and the skills they discovered, all whose noble deeds earned life in the memory of others.”

Anchises (Aeneas’s father) explains from the Underworld the punishment that shades undergo before being reincarnated. He links this process to all of creation through what the translator notes as “elements from several ancient philosophical schools”:

“First, you must grasp that the heaven and earth and the sea’s liquid flatness, also the gleaming sphere of the moon, constellations, the huge sun feed on internal energy. Mind, which suffuses these cosmis limbs, pervades the vast body and keeps the mass vital. This mixture generates life within humans and beasts, flying creatures, and also monsters Ocean spawns below marbled plains on its surface. Fire endows them with force, and the source of the seeds for that fire is, though it’s slowed and restricted by noxious bodies, the heavens. Earth-made flesh, limbs slouching to death, dull much of its vital force, causing people to fear and desire, suffer pain, and feel pleasure, fail to see open skies in their prison of darkness and blindness.”

The clash of Pompey and Julius Caesar is prophesied:

“Those, though, the souls that you see all ablaze in identical armour, hearts so harmonious now – and as long as the darkness constrains them – oh, what a massive war, what battles they’ll kindle between them, what great slaughter, if they should arrive in the light of the living!”

Another invocation of the Muse occurs later in the book, before the author begins another difficult task of grand scope:

“All this I will explain, I’ll recall what led to the start of the fighting. You, goddess, prompt your seer. I’ll speak about hideous warfare, I’ll speak of battle, of kings who were driven to death by their courage, what part Etruscans played, how Hesperia’s whole land was bullied into the fight. As the worldview birthing within me is great. My labour’s greater too.”

This line of Juno’s is sometimes quoted as, “If I can’t move the minds of heaven, then I will raise hell”:

“I, Jupiter’s mighty wife, though I, who couldn’t leave any challenge untried or direction unprobed, am denied my fulfilment. I’m being crushed by aeneas. And if my own authority isn’t great enough, i shouldn’t balk at appeals to more adequate sources. If I can’t influence powers above, I’ll move Acheron’s waters.”

“Off you go then, and be mocked as you hazard your life to face dangers unthanked! Flatten Etruscan lines, shield the peace of the Latins! This is what Saturn’s almighty daughter, in person, commanded me to tell you to your face while you lay in night’s stillness, unconscious. Come on, be glad to arm up for a fight, get your lads into armour, ready to march through the gate. Burn out these Phrygian captains squatting on our lovely river and burn up their brightly daubed navy! Spirits of heaven with huge raw force so bid.”

“Still, though, the goddess at crossroads buried Hippolytus far off, hiding him in her remote shrine, the nymph Egeria’s woodlands, so he could live life alone and unknown within Italy’s forests, renamed virbius: saving his life by erasing its meaning.”

“This is the threshold victorious Hercules crossed, and this palace was ample enough to contain him. Dare to be worthy of this god, my guest, and think nothing of riches: pattern your being on his. Don’t be harsh on my poverty. Enter.”

“All through the earth other conscious creatures were yielding their anxious tensions to sleep. Their hearts had forgotten the weights of their burdens.”

“But he arose as the enemy neared and Euryalus plunged his blade hilt-deep in his chest, then withdrew. Death came in abundance. Spewing the crimson of life, he returns to the bowl a new mixture: wine and his blood as he dies.”

“Turnus, himself now fully equipped in his armour, is rousting men to take arms. Each chief hones lines that are battle-keen, bronze-clad, whetting the edge of their wrath with assorted rumours and stories.”

“Visions of empire arouse me no more; I cherished them only while there was still such a thing as albeit changeable Fortune.”

“Her strength is her blood that’s Etruscan. Hate of Mezentius arms five hundred from here to oppose him. Mantua’s river-god, crowned with his father Benacus’s grey reeds, sails as their flagship, the Mincius, hate hewn into his pine planks.”

“Like weather-fronts fiercely warring in vast shared skies, with their wind gusts equal in power, neither they and their clouds, nor their strong seas, yield in the contest, stalled in prolonged deadlock, all nature frozen in conflict, just so the Trojan front and the Latin front, as they battled, fought, foot jammed against foot, dense packed, man pitted against man.”

“Jupiter spoke to him, father to son, with a friend’s understanding: ‘Each man has his day marked. Life’s short years can’t be recovered. That’s why a man’s real task is to reach beyond life in achievement, pass beyond fate, beyond rumour to fame.”

Virgil makes a rare exclamation. His author’s voice is varied throughout the book.:

“Witness the human mind, knowing nothing of fate or the future, nothing about moderation when puffed with success and good fortune! Turnus will find there’s a time when he’ll wish he could purchase an unscatehed Pallas, a time when he’ll hate these spoils and the day that he won them.”

“‘Die now. Don’t abandon your brother, good brother.’ Then he reveals life’s lair in the chest with a skilful incision. Such were the deaths that the Dardan commander dispensed on the flatlands, out of control, like a torrent in flood, like a raging tornado black in the sky.”

“Smiling at this, and yet also enraged, Mezentius answered: ‘Die now. In my case, the father of gods and the ruler of mortals handles the details, I think.’ Then he tugged the spear out of the body. Rigid rest and an ironclad sleep slammed eyes into blindness: light and perception were damned to a night of darkness eternal.”

“Ferocious wrath flares yet more intensely now in the dardan chief. As the Fates pluck the last threads of Lausus’ lifespan, Aeneas thrusts, full force, with his powerful sword’s blade clear through the young man’s belly and buries it hilt-deep inside him. Through the light shield, no match for his challenge, the point, penetrating, pierces the tunic of soft supple gold that his mother had woven. Blood gushes over his lap as he sings; life flees from his body, sad on the breath of the winds to its place among lingering shadows.”

“‘Fate, with identical horrors of war, calls us, from our tears here, elsewhere to others. Goodbye for eternity, wonderful Pallas, through all eternity, here’s my farewell!’ That was all. He now headed back to the high walls, directing his stride straight into the fortress.”

“Turnus, not they, should have faced this death. That would have been fairer. If he’s prepared to end war with his hand, and get rid of hte Teucrians, these are the weapons, and I am the man honour called him to challenge.”

“Three times, arrayed in their bright-flashing armour, they run round the burning Pyres; three times they ritually circle the funeral’s mourning flames upon horseback, and howling mouths halloo loud lamentation. Earth is bedewed with the same damp tears that bedew all their armour.”

“Then everywhere vast fields rival each other with close-set clusters of blossoming fires. Daylight had pushed the cold shadows aside for a third time; the mourners started to break down high-heaped ash and unsortable tangled bones from the pyres and compress them beneath a warm earthen embankment.”

“Now he adds weight to the forces of anger, expands their dimensions. ‘No one is blind to this crisis you seek our advice on. It doesn’t need my voice to explain it, my lord. They admit that they all grasp history’s plan for our people, but limit their comments to mumbling. Let this man allow freedom of speech, and suppress his own windy bluster. I’ll speak, though he threatens to bring me death with a sword-thrust.’”

“Yet how I wish we could muster a trace of traditional manhood! Blessed in his labours beyond other men, as I see it, transcending ordinary souls is the man who meets death to avoid seeing conduct just like this, who bites dirt with his teeth only once and for ever.”

“But, if we have the resources and youths still able of body, if there are cities to help us in Italy, people surviving, and if the glory the Trojans won cost a great deal of bloodshed – they had their own losses too, for the storm struck all sides with equal power – then why do we yield in disgrace on the very first threshold? Why do our limbs start shaking before any bugle has sounded? Much does improve in a day. Man’s labours vary as seasons change. And since fortune must visit so many in turn, she will sometimes make us look stupid and then us back in a solid position.”

“Clytius’ soon, Euneus, was first. And she hurled a long pine-shaft clear through the chest he exposed when he turned round to face her. Collapsing, vomiting rivers of blood, he kept biting the ground he’d made gory, writhing in spasms of death round the very wound that destroyed him.”

“Now the pursued was pursuer. He pleaded and begged as she rose up higher and hacked through the arms of the man, through his bones, with her mighty axe-blade, again and again. Gashes flooded his whole face with hot brains.”

“Meanwhile Aeneas, who’s no less a savage in armour his mother gave him, is honing his own martial edge, self-lashed in his anger, thrilled that the war’s being settled on terms that this treaty has offered.”

“Sword unsheathed, he’s poised for a strike, when the other swings back his axe, splits open his lax foe’s forehead and jawbone, irrigates flanges of armour with spattered blood. And upon him rigid repose steals, binding his eyes in a prison of iron slumber, their brightness jailed in eternity’s night-time of blindness.”

“Now, like Mars unleashing wars in the land of the ice-cold Hebrus, a vision of blood, his shield vibrating like thunder, setting his frenzied stallions loose at a wild gallop over sprawling flatlands, faster than southerlies, faster than zephyrs, wringing groans from the distant borders of Thrace with their hoofbeats, circled by faces of Dark Terror, Anger, and Ambush, the god’s own retinue, so too Turnus ferociously lashes his horses, steaming with sweat, to the hub of the battle and crushes his grimly butchered foe.”

“After invoking as witness both Jupiter and the mistreated pact many times, he now finally enters the thick of the fighting, fearsome, with Mars on his side, wreaking indiscriminate, savage slaughter. He throws off all further restrain and unleashes his anger.”

“Well, shall I run? Will this land see Turnus’s back as he’s fleeing? Is drying really so bad? Oh souls of the dead, I implore you, show me some kindness since powers above now will my destruction. Let my soul, unacquainted with charges of cowardice, go down pure to your world.”

“Shocked stock-still and confused by the mixture of images conjured, Turnus just stood there in silence and stared. In this one heart, a maelstrom seethed: huge eddies of shame, cross-currents of grief and of madness, love and courageous awareness of self set boiling by fury.”

“The pair appears flanking jupiter’s throne at the savage king’s threshold, honing the fears he inspires among humans, sickly and death-doomed, each time the king of the gods masses hideous death and diseases over their heads, or brings terrors of war upon cities that earn them.”

“This is his compensation to me for virginity ravished! What did he grant me eternal life for, stripping me of life’s basic terms, that we die, and of power to end, as I certainly would now, all my pain, and to walk at my poor brother’s side through the shadows? I cannot die! What joy will I have in anything round me, brother, without you? Has earth no abyss deep enough to devour, de-deify me, dispatch me to death’s abysmal remoteness?’ Such were her words. Then, shrouding her head with the grey of her mantle, groaning profoundly, the goddess entombs herself deep in her waters.”

Lastly, from earlier in the book:

“Amor now tries to surprise, with a living passion, a heart where the fire has died and where love is a memory. ”

About the photo

It’s another view of Cape Horn and Phoca Rock in the Columbia River gorge from Dec 2020.