I'm sorry no one has picked up the "Christianus Maro" query. This is the
exactly the right place for that kind of question.
I have just finished watching a Spanish film, "Son de mar" (1998),
directed by Bigas Luna. The main character, Ulises, teaches literature
at a high school by the sea and wins the love of his landlord's daughter
by reciting lines (in Spanish, not Latin) from the Aeneid. There's the
cave, of course, and a passage which never seemed sexy to me, the
description of two snakes breasting the waves and squeezing Laocoon.
This second passage is apparently the girl's favorite, and he recites it
to her at key points in the story (either prior to or during sex).
I won't say anything more about the plot, in case anyone wants to go out
and see it on DVD. Suffice it to say that the main character has more in
common with his namesake than with Aeneas. If you've read Cavafy's poem
"Ithaka," you know more or less what the problem is going to be.
I was struck by two things:
1. All poetry, even about man-eating snakes, becomes sexy when chanted
slowly, in a serious voice, by a man with no shirt on.
2. There really is something erotic, and not just tragic, about Juno
making the signal for marriage at the mouth of the cave. Maybe that was
obvious -- it was probably obvious to me when I was eighteen and read
the poem for the first time -- but it's apparently something you can
forget. I had.
Martin Hughes commented on the HBO series "Rome" a few months back: in
spite of the lurid sex and all of the historical nonsense, "I think that
the series does convey an interesting, even in the end subtle, view of
Caesar as someone half convinced of a half truth, that he is acting in
the end from religious rather than self-interested motives. Also the
view explored by V in E5?"
My reaction wasn't so philosophical. I liked the animated graffiti in
the title sequence of each episode, and I thought the incest between
Octavian and Octavia was just ridiculous. "Don't worry, it's unlikely
that I seeded you," he tells her the next time they see each other.
"Seeded you!" What I like about this Octavian, though, is that, while
he's calculating, he's not actually cold, so much as clear-seeing. I've
seen cold, ruthless, administrative Octavian scores of times and this is
more interesting. Don't know how much of this is the script, and how
much the actor's warmth (he was the blond boy who loses his arm a few
years back in "Master and Commander"), but I'm grateful.
While I am gathering up loose threads: belated congratulations are due
here to Leofranc Holford-Strevens, whose Aulus Gellius, with its
learned and sometimes stinging prose, is now available in a second
edition AND in paperback. This is one of the few books I know of that's
written by a classicist AND takes scholarship from the Renaissance
seriously. Too much of what is called "reception history" is really just
checking to see whether your predecessors in the Renaissance agreed with
you and, if they didn't, then too bad for them. The old commentaries
weren't any more infallible than the modern ones, but there are still
things we can learn from them.
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Dr. David Wilson-Okamura http://virgil.org david@virgil.org
English Department Virgil reception, discussion, documents, &c
East Carolina University Sparsa et neglecta coegi. -- Claude Fauchet
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