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Publius Vergilius Maro aka Virgil
Publius Vergilius Maro was born of peasant stock in 70 BCE, but managed to rise into the upper echelon of Roman society by the time of his death in 19 BCE. He is best known for his epic poem The Aeneid, which was unfinished at the time of his death. It was this epic commissioned by Augustus Caesar outlined the founding of Rome by a Trojan refugee and gave Rome its sense of destiny and history, which the young empire lacked compared to the older civilizations of the age.Virgil was twenty when th [...]
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THE SONG OF ROLAND
The song of Roland (La Chanson de Roland) is a poem written in the 8th century about King Charlemagne and the battle of Roncevaux in 778. It tells of Charlemagne’s fight with the Muslims in Spain and the Muslim king Marsilla. There is one last city left to fall, the city of Saragossa. Marsilla is aware of Charlemagne’s huge army and fearing he is about to lose he decides to strike a deal with the Emperor. Marsilla sends out his messengers to Charlemagne and his army of Franks and offers all his treasure and a promise of his conversion to Christianity if only they leave the city and return to…
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The Trojan War
The Trojan War is probably one of the most widely known wars of all time but most of what we know about the Trojan War is based on myth. We have probably all read or at least heard of Homer’s Iliad. The Iliad tells a part of the last year of the siege of Troy. The Trojan War is mentioned in the old epic poems in the Epic Cycle, also known as the Cyclic Epics: the Cypria, Aethiopis, Little Iliad, Iliou Persis, Nostoi, and Telegony. Though these poems survive only in fragments, t [...]
