Friday 17 October 2014

"No Boundary In Space Or Time"

Poul and Karen Anderson's character, Gratillonius, the last King of Ys, loves the Roman epic, the Aeneid, but dislikes Greek poetry because he does not understand the latter.

I suggest that Homer and the poets are the Classical parallels of Moses and the prophets while the Aeneid parallels the New Testament. The Bible is Hebrew and Greek; the Classics are Greek and Latin.

 In the Aeneid, Jupiter promises:

"'To Romans I set no boundary in space or time. I have granted them dominion, and it has no end.'"
-Virgil, The Aeneid, trans. WF Jackson Knight, (Harmondsworth, Middlesex, 1982), p. 36.

Well, it is a national epic. Mussolini might have thought that he was regaining the endless dominion. Manuel Argos bases his Terran Empire on the Roman Empire. Combining Classics and scriptures, someone else might argue that the Roman Catholic Church fulfills both the promise to Abraham and Jupiter's prophecy of endless Roman dominion?

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