Aeneid Quotes

Fléctere si néqueo súperos Acheronta movebo - If I cannot move heaven, I will raise hell.

The descent into Hell is easy

Let me rage before I die.

The gates of Hell are open night and day; smooth the descent and easy is the way.

Do the gods light this fire in our hearts or does each man's mad desire become his god?

forsan et haec olim meminisse iuvabit. and perhaps it will be pleasing to have remembered these things one day

Through pain I've learned to comfort suffering men

Una Salus Victis Nullam Sperare Salutem - (Latin - written 19 BC) The only hope for the doomed, is no hope at all...

The gates of hell are open night and day; Smooth the descent, and easy is the way: But to return, and view the cheerful skies, In this the task and mighty labor lies.

...She nourishes the poison in her veins and is consumed by a secret fire.

It is easy to go down into Hell...; but to climb back again, to retrace one's steps to the upper air---there's the rub...

Ah, merciless Love, is there any length to which you cannot force the human heart to go?

Facilis descensus Averno: Noctes atque dies patet atri ianua Ditis; Sed revocare gradium superasque evadere ad auras, Hoc opus, hic labor est. (The gates of Hell are open night and day; Smooth the descent, and easy is the way: But to return, and view the cheerful skies, In this task and mighty labor lies.)

Death's brother, sleep.

Vera incessu patuit dea. (The goddess indubitable was revealed in her step.)

But the queen--too long she has suffered the pain of love, hour by hour nursing the wound with her lifeblood, consumed by the fire buried in her heart. [...] His looks, his words, they pierce her heart and cling-- no peace, no rest for her body, love will give her none.

So Aeneas pleaded, his face streaming tears. Three times he tried to fling his arms around his neck, three times he embraced--nothing...the phantom sifting through his fingers, light as wind, quick as a dream in flight.

the dewy night unrolls a heaven thickly jewelled with sparkling stars

Tu ne cede malis, sed contra audentior ito

Friend, have the courage To care little for wealth, and shape yourself, You too, to merit godhead.

A shifty, fickle object is woman, always. (Varium et mutabile semper femina.)

Duty bound, Aeneas, though he struggled with desire to calm and comfort her in all her pain, to speak to her and turn her mind from grief, and though he sighed his heart out, shaken still with love if her, yet took the course heaven gave him and turned back to the fleet.

What good are prayers and shrines to a person mad with love? The flame keeps gnawing into her tender marrow hour by hour, and deep in her heart the silent wound lives on.

So ran the speech. Burdened and sick at heart, He feigned hope in his look, and inwardly Contained his anguish. […] Aeneas, more than any, secretly Mourned for them all

flectere si nequeo superos, Acheronta movebo

the dank night is sweeping down from the sky and the setting stars incline our heads to sleep.

Forsan et haec olim meminisse juvabit.

Facilis descensus Averni: noctes atque dies patet atri ianua Ditis; sed revocare gradium superasque evadere ad auras. hoc opus, hic labor est.

Agnosco veteris vestigia flammae.

Sunt lacrimae rerum et mentem mortalia tangunt

And as he spoke he wept. Three times he tried to reach arms round that neck. Three times the form, reached for in vain, escaped Like a breeze between his hands, a dream on wings.

..and why the winter suns so rush to bathe themselves in the sea and what slows down the nights to a long lingering crawl...

Forsan et haec olim meminisse iuvabit - Perhaps even these things will be good to remember one day

et iam nox umida caelo praecipitat suadentque cadentia sidera somnos

What a tale he's told, what a bitter bowl of war he's drunk to the dregs.

Through chances various, through all vicissitudes, we make our way...

Well, sometimes everybody tells you something because it is true." "Sometimes," Nina clarified, "everybody tells you something because they are everybody. But why should one listen to everybody? Did everybody write the Odyssey? Did everybody write the Aeneid?

Will Mars be always in your windy tongue and in your flying feet?

Now, whoever has courage and a strong and collected spirit in his breast, let him come forward, lace on the gloves and put up his hands. (5.363-364)

Emilia stared at me for three or four more seconds, then gave up on pumping me for information. “We should go,” she decided with the force of a monarch declaring law. “I have Latin first period. The Aeneid waits for no man.

No other evil we know is faster than Rumor, thriving on speed and becoming stronger by running. Small and timid at first, then borne on a light air, she flits over ground while hiding her head on a cloud-top.

Roman, remember by your strength to rule Earth’s peoples – for your arts are to be these: To pacify, to impose the rule of law, To spare the conquered, battle down the proud.

The Greeks shape bronze statues so real they seem to breathe, And carve cold marble until it almost comes to life. The Greeks compose great orations, and measure The heavens so well they can predict the rising of the stars. But you, Romans, remember your great arts; To govern the peoples with authority, To establish peace under the rule of law, To conquer the mighty, and show them mercy once they are conquered." -Virgil, Aeneid VI, 847-853

All literature, highbrow or low, from the Aeneid onward, is fan fiction....Through parody and pastiche, allusion and homage, retelling and reimagining the stories that were told before us and that we have come of age loving--amateurs--we proceed, seeking out the blank places in the map that our favorite writers, in their greatness and negligence, have left for us, hoping to pass on to our own readers--should we be lucky enough to find any--some of the pleasure that we ourselves have taken in the stuff that we love: to get in on the game. All novels are sequels; influence is bliss.

The signs of the old flame, I know them well. I pray that the earth gape deep enough to take me down or the almighty Father blast me with one bolt to the shades, the pale, glimmering shades in hell, the pit of night, before I dishonor you, my conscience, break your laws.

The seeds of life - fiery is their force, divine their birth, but they are weighed down by the bodies' ills or dulled by limbs and flesh that's born for death. That is the source of all men's fears and longings, joys and sorrows, nor can they see the heaven's light, shut up in the body's tomb, a prison dark and deep.

Such words he utters, and sick with deep distress he feigns hope on his face, and keeps his anguish hidden deep in his breast.

My comrades, hardly strangers to pain before now, we all have weathered worse. Some god will grant us an end to this as well. You've threaded the rocks resounding with Scylla's howling rabid dogs, and taken the brunt of the Cyclops' boulders, too. Call up your courage again. Dismiss your grief and fear. A joy it will be one day, perhaps, to remember even this. Through so many hard straits, so many twists and turns our course holds firm for Latium. There Fate holds out a homeland, calm, at peace. There the gods decree the kingdom of Troy will rise again. Bear up. Save your strength for better times to come.

There are twin Gates of Sleep. One, they say, is called the Gate of Horn and it offers easy passage to all true shades. The other glistens with ivory, radiant, flawless, but through it the dead send false dreams up toward the sky. And here Anchises, his vision told in full, escorts his son and Sibyl both and shows them out now through the Ivory Gate.

My son, from whence this madness, this neglect Of my commands, and those whom I protect? Why this unmanly rage? Recall to mind Whom you forsake, what pledges leave behind.

Macte virtute, sic itur ad astra. ("excellence is the way to the stars" - IX.641)

Every man's last day is fixed. Lifetimes are brief, and not to be regained, for all mankind. But by their deeds to make their fame last: that is labor for the brave.

Frantic in my fury I had no time for decisions; I only remembered that death in battle is glorious.

...but which of us has read every line of the Iliad, or the Aeneid, or The Divine Comedy, or Paradise Lost? Only men of epic stomach can digest these epic tales.

Meanwhile Aeneas the True longed to allay her grief and dispel her sufferings with kind words. yet he remained obedient to the divine command, and with many a sigh, for he was shaken to the depths by the strength of his love, returned to his ships.

Arma virumque cano........." *Literally: "I sing of arms and man". __I sing the praises of a man's stuggles__

Unconscionable Love, To what extremes will you not drive our hearts!

But if my forces are not enough, I am hardly the one to relent, I’ll plead for the help I need, wherever it may be - if I cannot sway the heavens, I’ll wake the powers of hell!

Viresque Acquirit Eundo.(She gathers strength as she goes.)

As I look ahead, I am filled with foreboding. Like the Roman, I seem to see "the River Tiber foaming with much blood.

I dragged on my ruined life in darkness and grief, wrathful in my heart...

He pulled out a book here and there, but what kept catching his attention were the diagonal tunnels of sunlight rolling in through the dormer windows. All around him dust motes rose and fell, shimmering, quivering in those shafts of roiling light. He found several shelves full of old editions of classical writers and began vaguely browsing, hoping to find a cheap edition of Virgil's Aeneid, which he had only ever read in a borrowed copy. It wasn't really the great poem of antiquity that Dorrigo Evans wanted though, but the aura he felt around such books--an aura that both radiated outwards and took him inwards to another world that said to him that he was not alone. And this sense, this feeling of communion, would at moments overwhelm him. At such times he had the sensation that there was only one book in the universe, and that all books were simply portals into this greater ongoing work--an inexhaustible, beautiful world that was not imaginary but the world as it truly was, a book without beginning or end.

[He] Spoke and rose to full height, sword in air, Then cleft the man's brow square between the temples Cutting his head in two -- a dreadful gash Between the cheeks all beardless. Earth resounded Quivering at the great shock of his weight As he went tumbling down in all his armor, Drenched with blood and brains; in equal halves His head hung this and that way from his shoulders.

Timeo Danaos et dona ferentes

Woe! We are shipwrecked by fate, we are driven before the storm! (Latinus)

Then answered her son, who turns the stars in the sky: 'What way art thou bending fate, Mother? What dost thou ask For these thy ships? May vessels built by the hands Of mortal men claim an immortal right? Is Aeneas to pass, sure of the outcome, through dangers When nothing is sure? To what god is such power allowed?

Night reigned: all through the world tied bodies were harvesting tranquil slumber.

Solve metus

Queaque ipsa miserrima vidi,et quorum pars magna fui. (And those terrible things I saw, and in which I played a great part.)

Mirabile dictu!

No help or hope of help existed.

To each man shall his own free actions bring both his suffering and his good fortune. Jupiter is impartially king over all alike. The Fates will find the way.

The seeds of life—fiery is their force, divine their birth, but they are weighed down by the bodies’ ills or dulled by earthly limbs and flesh that’s born for death.

I will carry you on my back. This labor of love will never wear me down. Whatever falls to us now, we both will share one peril, one path to safety.

Though far away, I will chase you with murky brands and, when chill death has severed soul and body, everywhere my shade shall haunt you.

To Romans I set no boundary in space or time. I have granted them dominion, and it has no end.

Then, like ravening wolves in a black mist, when the belly's lawless rage has driven them blindly forth, and their whelps at home await them with thirsty jaws, through swords, through foes we pass to certain death, and hold our way to the city's heart; black night hovers around with sheltering shade.

Gods whose dominion is over the Souls, Shades without sound, Void, and you, Burning River, and you, broad Spaces voiceless beneath the Night, may I remain sinless in telling what has been told to me, and, by your divine assent, reveal truth sunk in depths of earth and gloom.

The History of Ireland in two words: Ah well. The Invasion by the Vikings: Ah well. The Invasion by the Normans. The Flight of the Earls, Mr Oliver Cromwell. Daniel O’Connell, Robert Emmett, The Famine, Charles Stewart Parnell, Easter Rising, Michael Collins, Éamon De Valera, Éamon De Valera again (Dear Germany, so sorry to learn of the death of your Mr Hitler), Éamon De Valera again, the Troubles, the Tribunals, the Fianna Fáil Party, The Church, the Banks, the eight hundred years of rain: Ah well. In the Aeneid Virgil tells it as Sunt lacrimae rerum, which in Robert Fitzgerald’s translation means ‘They weep for how the world goes’, which is more eloquent than Ah well but means the same thing.

So therefore you must lift up your eyes and seek to discern this bough, find it as is required of you, and pick it boldly.Then, if it is indeed you whom the fates are calling, it will come willingly and easily

His accensa super, iactatos aequore toto Troas, reliquias Danaum atque immitis Achilli, arcebat longe Latio, multosque per annos errabant, acti fatis, maria omnia circum. Tantae molis erat Romanam condere gentem!

The sky and the lands, the watery plains, the moon's gleaming face, the Titanic Sun and the stars are all strengthened by Spirit working within them, and by Mind, which is blended into all the vast universe and pervades every part of it, enlivening the whole mass.

Naviget:  haec summa est; hic nostri nuntius esto.

Faunique

Non ignora mali, miseris succurrere disco.

The gods thought otherwise. Dis aliter visum.

Cui Pyrrhus:  'Referes ergo haec et nuntius ibis Pelidae genitori; illi mea tristia facta degeneremque Neoptolemum narrare memento. Nunc morere.

Sic nos in sceptra reponis?

obscuris vera involvens:

if so great be thy yearning to know of our sorrows

Una salus victis, nullam sperare salutem!

Arma virumque cano........." *Literally: "I sing of arms and man". __I sing the praises of a man's struggles__” Translation of the opening verses of the first book of Virgil´s Aeneid, by John Dryden( XVII century) "Arms, and the man I sing, who, forc\'d by fate, And haughty Juno\'s unrelenting hate, Expell\'d and exil\'d, left the Trojan shore. Long labors, both by sea and land, he bore, And in the doubtful war, before he won The Latian realm, and built the destin\'d town; His banish\'d gods restor\'d to rites divine, And settled sure succession in his line, From whence the race of Alban fathers come, And the long glories of majestic Rome".

But the Danaan princes and Agamemnon’s battalions, soon as they saw the man and his arms flashing amid the glom, trembled with mighty fear; some turn to flee, as of old they sought the ships; some raise a shout – faintly; the cry essayed mocks their gaping mouths.

non et vario noctem sermone trahebat infelix Dido, longumque bibebat amorem, multa super Priamo rogitans, super Hectore multa; nunc quibus Aurorae venisset filius armis, nunc quales Diomedis equi, nunc quantus Achilles.

Up until relatively recently, creating original characters from scratch wasn't a major part of an author's job description. When Virgil wrote The Aeneid, he didn't invent Aeneas; Aeneas was a minor character in Homer's Odyssey whose unauthorized further adventures Virgil decided to chronicle. Shakespeare didn't invent Hamlet and King Lear; he plucked them from historical and literary sources. Writers weren't the originators of the stories they told; they were just the temporary curators of them. Real creation was something the gods did. All that has changed. Today the way we think of creativity is dominated by Romantic notions of individual genius and originality, and late-capitalist concepts of intellectual property, under which artists are businesspeople whose creations are the commodities they have for sale.

If modern scholars overlook the entertainment motive, dominant in the Iliad, and treat Homer as a Virgil, Dante, or Milton, rather than as a Shakespeare or Cervantes, they are doing him a great disservice. The Iliad, Don Quixote and Shakespeare’s later plays are life—tragedy salted with humour; the Aeneid, the Inferno and Paradise Lost are literary works of almost superhuman eloquence, written for fame not profit, and seldom read except as a solemn intellectual task. The Iliad, and its later companion-piece, the Odyssey, deserve to be rescued from the classroom curse which has lain heavily on them throughout the past twenty-six centuries, and become entertainment once more; which is what I have attempted here. How this curse fell on them can be simply explained.

Swift is her walk, more swift her winged haste: A monstrous phantom, horrible and vast. As many plumes as raise her lofty flight, So many piercing eyes inlarge her sight; Millions of opening mouths to Fame belong, And ev'ry mouth is furnish'd with a tongue, And round with list'ning ears the flying plague is hung. She fills the peaceful universe with cries; No slumbers ever close her wakeful eyes; By day, from lofty tow'rs her head she shews, And spreads thro' trembling crowds disastrous news; With court informers haunts, and royal spies; Things done relates, not done she feigns, and mingles truth with lies. Talk is her business, and her chief delight To tell of prodigies and cause affright.

«Excudent alii spirantia mollius aera (credo equidem), vivos ducent de marmore vultus, orabunt causas melius, caelique meatus describent radio et surgentia sidera dicent: tu regere imperio populos, Romane, memento (hae tibi erunt artes), pacisque imponere morem, parcere subiectis et debellare superbos» "Others will hammer out more gently breathing bronzes, I believe so truly they will draw living expressions from marble, they will plead causes better and they will map with a compass the movements of the sky and will tell of rising stars: You, oh Roman, remember to rule the nations with authority (these will be your arts), and to impose a rule of peace, to spare the vanquished and to eradicate the arrogant

Turnus, brought low, raised his eyes and an outstretched right hand in humble entreaty, and said: "This is my own desert; I make no appeal. Enjoy the fortune which falls to you. And if a poor father's sorrow can affect you - and you yourself had in Anchises such a father as mine - I beg of you, take pity on Daunus in his old age, and restore me, or, if you so prefer it, my dead body despoiled of life, to my own people. You have conquered; and Ausinian men have seen me hold forth hands uplifted in defeat. Lavinia is yours to wed. Stretch not your hatred further.

I won’t hold you, I won’t even refute you — go! — strike out for Italy on the winds, your realm across the sea. I hope, I pray, if the just gods still have any power, wrecked on the rocks mid-sea you’ll drink your bowl of pain to the dregs, crying out the name of Dido over and over, and worlds away I’ll hound you then with pitch-black flames, and when icy death has severed my body from its breath, then my ghost will stalk you through the world! You’ll pay, you shameless, ruthless — and I will hear of it, yes, the report will reach me even among the deepest shades of Death!