The Aeneid

Hosted by Chris Piuma and Suzanne Conklin Akbari

The runners took their places. At the signal,
They sprang across the line and down the course,
Pouring like clouds. Now with the goal in sight,
Nisus flashed out ahead of them to first place
As swiftly as the wind or wings of thunder.
The next, though only after a long gap,
Was Salius; Euryalus came third,
Some distance back.
Helymus followed him, and after that
Diores sped—his foot brushed on a heel,
His shoulder loomed. And had the track been longer,
He would have slipped ahead or tied for fourth.
But as they came exhausted to the last stretch,
Poor Nisus skidded in some slippery blood
Which had poured down and wet the grassy ground
When—as it happened—steers were slaughtered there.
Already thrilled with victory, the young man
Did a short dance against the fall but fell
Face-first in filthy dung and sacred blood.

Virgil’s Aeneid, the epic poem about how “it was so hard to found the race of Rome”, was commissioned by the first Roman Emperor, Augustus, as a piece of propaganda, and was unfinished at the time of Virgil’s death. And yet it became possibly the most important work in European literature for well over a thousand years. Its hero, Aeneas, is tasked by the gods to escape Troy as it falls and found a new city in Italy—and yet other gods try to prevent this from happening. Amongst his varied adventures, there’s an entire section devoted to a day of sports on the beach, and that’s the section Chris and Suzanne zero in on as they try to unpack what’s going on in this section and in the poem as a whole.

32. The Aeneid.

The Spouter-Inn Virgil’s epic poem about the founding of Rome (and a day of sports on the beach). More episodes

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Show Notes.

The Aeneid: Sarah Ruden’s translation [Bookshop]. Allan Mandelbaum’s translation [Bookshop].

[Chris got the notion that the Aeneid was supposed to be longer from Ruden’s introduction, but it may not be widely held.]

See also our episodes on the Iliad, the Odyssey, and the Inferno. Oh, and our last episode on C.L.R. James’s Beyond a Boundary.

On Messi vs. Ronaldo.

The kids who come out to the soccer pitch are called player escorts.

The sortes virgilianae can now be played online.

Ursula K. LeGuin: Lavinia.

The Aeneid, As Told in Subtweets.

Next: Georges Perec: W, or The Memory of Childhood. [Bookshop.]

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