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jumping from Greek to Rome, a very different culture

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we learn that the Romans borrow all of the Green myths and change the names and adopt the stories for themselves

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there is some truth to that

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it is more accurate to say that both Greeks and Romans were working from a common pool of Mediterranean materials which they each put their own spin on

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it's not quite right to look at the Romans as being derivative of the Greeks

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in Homer there was a limited amount of historical material you could reference

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Virgil (70BC-19BC)

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ancient Roman poet of the Augustan period

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known for three works: Eclogues (or Bucolics), the Georgics, and the epic Aeneid.

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Virgil is writing myth within history

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doing something different than what we have seen up till now

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we have lots of evidence around for the historical context in which Virgil is writing

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a different kind of context: myth is now being made within historical time

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a higher degree of difficulty to ascertain what is historical fact and what is myth he created to build a narrative of Romans

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he can't just tell a story in ahistorical cloudiness, he has to anchor it to well-known facts and stories of the time

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myth has been a way to understand identity

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especially in the case of Odysseus with individual identity

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identities getting dissolved before our very eyes as in the case of Oedipus and Pentheus

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Pentheus

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banned worship of Dionysus, did not allow women of to join rites, so Dyionysus caused women to tush to Mount Cithaeron in a Bacchic frenzy, so Pentheus imprisoned Dionysus thinking him a follower but chains fell off, Dionysus lured Pentheus to spy on Bacchis rites disguised as a woman, daughters of Camus see him in a tree, thought him a wild animal, tear him apart, mother puts his head on a stick and carries it back to town, then recognized him.

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with Virgil we look at identity through a new lens: the identity of a nation as a whole

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not what it means to be an individual, but what it means to be a Roman

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no poet up to know was try to craft a kind of Greekness for his, but this is Virgil's aim

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we may be able to see it in their stories but they weren't crafting this consciously

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indentity for an individual is above all a biological continuity

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connections to past

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but what about for a nation?

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not biological, although Virgil spins it in that way

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mostly myth, narrative, myths are the very stuff that national identities are made up of, takes the place of biology for individuals

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Scylla and Charybdis

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twin dangers

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one on each side of a straight

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Between Scylla and Charybdis

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Charybdis is sometimes the daughter of Poseidon and Gaia, very gluttonous

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Odysseus faced both Charybdis and Scylla

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twin dangers of history

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1. it is just a fact that happened

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the past is a very place, what counts as just the facts, it depends on which facts they pick

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it has to be relevant to some we, it guides the process of history

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we have to weed out practically all of it

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how we edit depends on a number of normative questions

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2. history is made up by the winners

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certainly people who have political power have an ability to make their version of events the authoritative one

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history is not just fabricated and its not just there

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if you want to understand a history you have to consider the process of editing

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1. accuracy: are the events happening

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2. fairness: is their representation fair

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e.g. you could make the point that in WWII there were atrocities on both sides, but this doesn't turn out to be a fair representation of what happened

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it doesn't represent the largeness and complexity of the events

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when studying Virgil, you have to ask:

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1. is he accurate?

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2. is he fair, is he representing Romans in a fair way?