Word: vergil
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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Encolpius offends Priapus. god of fertility and lust, and Priapus retaliates by making the buffoon impotent. The anguished lover delivers a severe lecture to his disabled member, but to no effect. Petronius borrows some lines from Vergil to describe the disaster...
...name of pius Aeneas calls to mind that of the immortal poet (70-19 B.C.) of whom it was written: "To be a Christian in Vergil's day was like being a Communist today." Ah, well, perhaps it is the wave of the future...
...were sacred and profane works never, or rarely, exhibited. Items: a 9th century copy of Terence's comedies, with illustrations showing actors in the authentic costumes of ancient Rome; Holy Roman Emperor Frederick II's 13th century manual on falconry; an illustrated sth century copy of Vergil. He also saw many Bibles -but none that surpasses in beauty the work commissioned by Federigo da Montefeltro, Duke of Urbino (1444-82), and one of the keenest bibliophiles of the" Renaissance...
...prison of Vac near Budapest, prisoners formed a remarkable literary cooperative. For writing paper, they stole toilet paper. They fashioned pens out of metal fragments and mixed blood and coffee grounds for ink. By pooling their memories, they produced portions of Ovid, Catullus, Vergil, Shakespeare and Whitman in the original Latin and English, then translated them into Hungarian. In the end, the Vac prisoners produced a handwritten, hand-bound, four-volume anthology of prose and verse...
They were double men, harking back nostalgically to the rustic, roughhewn virtues of the Romans who fought the Punic Wars, while themselves breathing the elegant, enervating and sometimes fetid air of imperial Rome. They tended to polish more than to publish. Only Vergil attempted the epic, and he thought so poorly of The Aeneid that on his deathbed he asked to destroy the manuscript. Catullus, Propertius and Tibullus were ravaged by hard-boiled mistresses, and their poems tell of virtually the only battle they ever fought-the war between the sexes. They knew or sensed that their culture...