<< message forwarded by listowner, David Wilson-Okamura >> Date: Thu, 18 Oct 2001 08:58:40 -0400 From: "Jim O'Hara" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
Patrick Roper is doubly right here, first in observing that it might well have been that Vergil wanted the Aeneid destroyed because he wasn't satisfied with it, and second in asking the crucial question "do we know this is what Virgil thought?" The answer is "no," there is no evidence about this, so one person's conjecture is as good as another's. For novelist's Hermann Broch's idea, that the dying Vergil wanted to keep the manuscript out of the hands of Augustus (also pure conjecture), see now Thomas, Virgil and the Augustan Reception, pp. 53-54. There is so much bad biographical information about Vergil that is taken to be fact, much of it based on ancient guess or specualtion, that it's important that we always label modern specualtion correctly -- Jim O'Hara Paddison Professor of Latin 206B Howell Hall phone: (919) 962-7649 fax: (919) 962-4036 e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED] www: http://www.unc.edu/~oharaj surface mail: James J. O'Hara Department of Classics CB# 3145, 101 Howell Hall The University of North Carolina Chapel Hill, NC 27599-3145 ----------------------------------------------------------------------- To leave the Mantovano mailing list at any time, do NOT hit reply. Instead, send email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with the message "unsubscribe mantovano" in the body (omitting the quotation marks). You can also unsubscribe at http://virgil.org/mantovano/mantovano.htm#unsub
