Leggere Virgilio – oggi?

I don’t usually repost Italian material on this blog, but Francesco’s piece below is too interesting not to acknowledge it. To the question, ‘Why would you read Virgil today?’, von Albrecht gives a number of convincing answers. First, he finds in Virgil a commentator of times not dissimilar from ours. Then, he points out the poet’s capacity for story-telling; language constitutes a third reason, and that is not something that only a Latinist can enjoy. Here I would add Alessandro Fo’s recent translation of the Aeneid into modern Italian hexameters which, if you speak the language, is a joy only surpassed by reading the Latin itself. Fourthly, he affirms Virgil’s personal anthropology, free from illusion and in constant dialogue with the political reality of the time; then, there’s the Mantuan’s mise-en-rapport of kinship and civic responsibility, pietas and fides; then, the poet’s relationship to history and the affirmation of a historical teleology, of an articulated vision which subsumes and orders disparate threads: turbulent waters all flowing towards a common and clear waterfall. Finally, Virgil is worth reading because he himself was a master reader. This mise-en-abîme underscores Virgil’s capacity to go beyond his sources, Homer in particular, to universalise history and to explain that mysterious coagulant that ties the citizen to the state.