INTERVIEWS
ACROSS THE CENTURIES
With Vergil, Ancient Rome, 70-19 BC
& Dante, Renaissance Italy 1265-1321 – Part I
George - O night! You who commands all to sleep, to
silence, so souls can start their eternal converse. How I’ve always wished to
have this soulful dialogues with each one of the human family across space and
time separating us!
Virgil-Quae te dementia cepit!
G- Is this Latin? Can your soul whisper it, please, in
English; English the language of the British.
V- Oh, penitus toto divisos orbe Britannos
(Deeply divided from the whole world are the British)
G- Now I can understand what you've said. But English is
today the international language that connect all the world together. Now, tell
me again what you said replying to my first lines!
V- Quae te dementia cepit!
(What madness has seized you?)
G- Do you find my eagerness to contact people across the
centuries madness? I say that because I have such a great love longing to get
together with all people of the past.
V- Omnia vincit Amor; et nos cedamus
Amori.
(Love conquers all; let us, too, yield to Love!)
G- Then, love can also conquer the barriers of time. What
if we start our meeting across the centuries separating us?
V- Magnus ab integro saeclorum nascitur ordo.
(The great line of the centuries begins anew.)
G- I don't know how to begin.
V- Audacibus annue coeptis.
(Look with favor upon a bold beginning)
G- Yes, I may need another soul to help me find a good
beginning and let me know you better.
Dante- Rispuosemi:
Non omo, omo già fui,
e li parenti miei furon lombardi,
mantoani per patrïa ambedui.
G- Oh, old Italian! Please whisper it in English below!
D- He answered me:
"Not man; man once I was,
And both my parents were of Lombardy,
And Mantuans by
country both of them."
G- I hear you introduce him in wonderful verses of your eternal work that we knew, after you had left our world in the 14th century, as the Divine Comedy. You must have loved him so much.
Dante and Virgil in Hell [detail] -- Adolphe-William Bouguereau
In the 1st century BCE Publius Vergilius Maro wrote 3 of the most famous poems in Latin literature: the "Eclogues" (or Bucolics), the "Georgics," and the "Aeneid" and is traditionally rwgarded as Roma's greatest poet. Born in Andes (Pietole Vecchia), a short distance from the center of Pietole in modern Virgilio, near Mantova (Mantua), he studied rhetoric, medicine, and astronomy before turning to philosophy. At the Epicurean school of Siro, in Neapolis (Napoli) he began to write poetry and mentioned Siro in 2 of his early works, in which he claimed to seek peace in his company. He was given the schoolboy nickame "Parthenias" ("maiden") because of his social aloofness, and may have spent much of his life as a semi-invalid. In 19 BCE he went to Greece to complete and revise the "Aeneid," but died in Brundisium harbor on his return to Italia. He instructed his literary executors, poets Lucius Varius Rufus (whom Virgil may have plagiarized) and Plotius Tucca, to burn the poem, which concerned the legendary origins of Roma, but the emperor ordered them to publish it with as few editorial changes as possible. Despite his poor health he was chosen by Dante Alighieri to be his imaginary guide through Inferno and part of Purgatorio in his "(Divina) Comedia" (the" Divine" part of the title was added a generation after Dante's death by Giovanni Boccaccio). “May my long study and the intense love that made me search your volume serve me now,” Dante proclaimed. “You are my master and my author, you -- the only one from whom my writing drew the noble style for which I have been honored.” Dante repeatedly referred to Virgil as "Lord," "Teacher," "Master," "guide, and "sage." However, along the way, Virgil repeatedly proves to be a false prophet (or at least a mistaken one) and eventually is supplanted as his guide through Paradiso by Beatrice, Dante's constant representation of love, and then by Bernardus Claraevallensis, the 12th-century French abbot who founded the Cistercian order of monks, inspired the charter of the Knights Templar (who claimed to be the ideal of Christian nobility), and preached the 2nd Crusade; among the miracles attributed to him one in particular may have appealed to the great poet: he restored the power of speech to an old man so he could confess his sins before he died.
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