1 00:00:04,740 --> 00:00:09,764 In book two, parallel to what happens in the Odyssey, Aeneas takes over the story 2 00:00:09,764 --> 00:00:14,160 and now begins to narrate for his Carthaginian hosts, his own past and 3 00:00:14,160 --> 00:00:18,117 what's happened to him. This of course goes right to the Trojan 4 00:00:18,117 --> 00:00:20,880 War. The Trojan War has, has ended and Virgil 5 00:00:20,880 --> 00:00:26,030 has our hero Aeneas talk about what has happened in his relatively recent past, 6 00:00:26,030 --> 00:00:30,490 this awful thing that has just gone on the fall of his beloved city. 7 00:00:30,718 --> 00:00:34,139 Virgil gives us a customary twist right away. 8 00:00:34,139 --> 00:00:39,133 No, the story doesn't just sit with Aeneas, as he keeps telling and telling 9 00:00:39,133 --> 00:00:43,697 what happened the story gets turned over early on to this figure Sinon. 10 00:00:43,882 --> 00:00:48,693 Sinon is a Greek whom the Trojans meet near the end of their undoing. 11 00:00:48,878 --> 00:00:54,182 It seems that the Greeks have all left, so they go outside Virgil or Aeneas with 12 00:00:54,182 --> 00:00:56,957 them. And they run across this vagabond Greek 13 00:00:56,957 --> 00:01:02,323 who claims to have been abandoned by his Greek countrymen and as they come and talk 14 00:01:02,323 --> 00:01:05,940 to him, they see next to him this giant wooden horse. 15 00:01:05,940 --> 00:01:08,506 At this point we say, you know, who's this Greek? 16 00:01:08,506 --> 00:01:10,417 We can't trust him. What this thing? 17 00:01:10,417 --> 00:01:13,803 We can't trust this. Sinon tells such a beautiful lie and a 18 00:01:13,803 --> 00:01:16,260 well constructed lie that the Trojans buy it. 19 00:01:16,260 --> 00:01:19,100 They un, they think that he's telling them the truth. 20 00:01:19,100 --> 00:01:24,388 What he tells them is that they, there's this evil crafty Odysseus, Ulysses and he 21 00:01:24,388 --> 00:01:28,501 has abandoned Sinon. Sinon has been pushed away now so he's now 22 00:01:28,501 --> 00:01:32,027 ready to betray the Greeks and give away their secret. 23 00:01:32,288 --> 00:01:37,380 The Greeks have built this horse because they understood from Athena that she was 24 00:01:37,380 --> 00:01:40,514 very angry with them for stealing the Palladium. 25 00:01:40,514 --> 00:01:45,607 They're now, as a substitute, they have constructed this beautiful horse on the 26 00:01:45,607 --> 00:01:50,923 hopes that the horse will never be brought into Troy because if it is brought into 27 00:01:50,923 --> 00:01:54,670 Troy, then Troy would never be able to be conquered. 28 00:01:54,670 --> 00:02:00,265 The Trojan are listening to this they, has an air of truth about it, Sinon is a very 29 00:02:00,265 --> 00:02:07,259 good liar and seem to be interested in it. Now there's this other person, Laocoon, 30 00:02:07,259 --> 00:02:10,880 who says, no, no, no, Don't believe any of this. 31 00:02:10,880 --> 00:02:15,982 It's a terrible lie. Well, up out of the sea come serpents that 32 00:02:15,982 --> 00:02:21,577 come and bite him famously depicted in many art, art, art forms from our past. 33 00:02:21,577 --> 00:02:27,749 The serpents come up and bite Sinon, Oh sorry, bite Laocoon and he instantly 34 00:02:27,749 --> 00:02:28,490 dies. Now, 35 00:02:28,490 --> 00:02:32,704 When that happens, the Trojans take this as a divine sign, reasonable enough for 36 00:02:32,704 --> 00:02:37,292 them to do so, that Laocoon in objecting to this is all wrong, and that now the 37 00:02:37,292 --> 00:02:41,240 Trojans have a redoubled urgency of bringing this horse inside their city. 38 00:02:41,418 --> 00:02:46,132 What happens when they do, we all know, focusing on sign on for a second, it's 39 00:02:46,132 --> 00:02:51,024 interesting to look what happens, well in the, odyssey, think about the number of 40 00:02:51,024 --> 00:02:55,797 times Odysseus lies, and the number of times Homer seems to admire him for doing 41 00:02:55,797 --> 00:03:00,313 it, also we get in the case of, Athena a kind of egging him on to lie. 42 00:03:00,313 --> 00:03:02,907 She's delighted when he lies. The gods like it. 43 00:03:02,907 --> 00:03:06,629 Humans like it when he does. Everyone is entertained by Odysseus's 44 00:03:06,629 --> 00:03:09,166 lies. Well here we have yeah, more lies coming 45 00:03:09,166 --> 00:03:12,437 from a Greek. You can imagine the Romans thinking about 46 00:03:12,437 --> 00:03:16,723 these Greeks as being great liars. But in this case, there's nothing charming 47 00:03:16,723 --> 00:03:19,881 about it at all. It means the undoing of the people that 48 00:03:20,050 --> 00:03:24,448 Virgil's story cares most about. So lies are definitely associated with the 49 00:03:24,448 --> 00:03:28,339 Greeks but they're not at all something that we smile about and like. 50 00:03:28,509 --> 00:03:32,911 They're terrible, terrible things. At this point now we get the definitive 51 00:03:32,911 --> 00:03:38,052 version of what happens at the end of the Trojan War, yes in deed written 1200 years 52 00:03:38,052 --> 00:03:42,425 after the fact in Virgil's account. This is the definitive version of what 53 00:03:42,425 --> 00:03:47,153 happens at the close of the Trojan War, including the Trojan Horse and the other 54 00:03:47,153 --> 00:03:49,931 things. The Greeks come out the horse in the 55 00:03:49,931 --> 00:03:54,659 middle of the night, after there has been great drinking and revelry, the Trojans 56 00:03:54,659 --> 00:03:57,554 are not ready for war and the Greeks run riot. 57 00:03:57,732 --> 00:04:01,810 When they do they annihilate the city, this is a terrible, terrible, 58 00:04:01,810 --> 00:04:05,617 Terrible thing. Virgil, narrates it with great detail. 59 00:04:05,814 --> 00:04:09,490 And also with, great concern, on the part of Aeneas. 60 00:04:09,687 --> 00:04:15,135 What's happening to his countrymen, what's happening to his family, what's happening 61 00:04:15,135 --> 00:04:18,483 to his city. Aeneas is going through all of this. 62 00:04:18,483 --> 00:04:24,325 Part of what's being built into the story, such as, Virgil lavishes it, to us through 63 00:04:24,325 --> 00:04:28,133 Aeneas's eyes is a sense that Aeneas has this hero figure. 64 00:04:28,133 --> 00:04:32,287 And a hero who's actually going to be founded on a core sense of duty and 65 00:04:32,287 --> 00:04:35,333 following through. The first thing he's going to have to do 66 00:04:35,333 --> 00:04:38,216 in order to get our story started is to abandon Troy. 67 00:04:38,216 --> 00:04:42,350 He's not going to go down with the ship. We're going to find that that's a strange 68 00:04:42,350 --> 00:04:45,722 thing in Virgil. Mostly what happens is that Aeneas is able 69 00:04:45,722 --> 00:04:49,149 to get his men through. People that have all their other men 70 00:04:49,149 --> 00:04:53,773 disappear from their own on missions where they are in charge, that's a problem. 71 00:04:53,773 --> 00:04:57,200 The great Roman generals are supposed to go down with the ship. 72 00:04:57,200 --> 00:05:04,134 So Riddle's got to start a story based on an abandonment of Troy through this figure 73 00:05:04,134 --> 00:05:10,416 of Aeneas, whose main core skill is his piatas, his duty, his ability to follow 74 00:05:10,416 --> 00:05:14,478 things through. But there are, of course, plenty of good 75 00:05:14,478 --> 00:05:19,210 reasons, for, Virgil or for Aeneas, to abandon what's happening. 76 00:05:19,413 --> 00:05:23,130 There are, figures that come down and tell him to. 77 00:05:23,130 --> 00:05:27,186 We have divine Gods that come. Ghosts that come and tell him. 78 00:05:27,388 --> 00:05:31,241 Other human beings. His wife herself, in the end, comes and 79 00:05:31,241 --> 00:05:36,052 begs, Aeneas to leave. So there's lots of reasonable, premises 80 00:05:36,052 --> 00:05:40,227 built into the story as to why Ineas has to leave, of course he does. 81 00:05:40,412 --> 00:05:46,145 There's a wonderful one that I just wanted to point to, in the case of Venus and 82 00:05:46,145 --> 00:05:54,977 Fitzgerald is in lines 780 to 825, 780 to 825 and it brings home a very specific 83 00:05:54,977 --> 00:06:01,544 kind of Virgilian twist how to present scenes of disaster like this. 84 00:06:01,544 --> 00:06:05,174 There is an eerie proof. To Aeneas that all is lost. 85 00:06:05,380 --> 00:06:10,873 You'll recall in this part of the epic Venus actually lifts the veil of reality 86 00:06:11,079 --> 00:06:16,710 and allows Aeneas to peer back behind the superficial surface of things to see 87 00:06:16,710 --> 00:06:21,105 what's actually happening in the underlying structure of things, 88 00:06:21,105 --> 00:06:25,705 The structure of the cosmos such as we hear Yopof singing about. 89 00:06:25,705 --> 00:06:28,864 When she peels that back, what does Aeneas see? 90 00:06:28,864 --> 00:06:34,357 He witnesses the gods themselves in these shadowy forms, hulk, in these hulk-like 91 00:06:34,357 --> 00:06:37,070 forms, Dismantling the walls of Troy. 92 00:06:37,070 --> 00:06:40,195 Now, That's a terrifying thing to see. 93 00:06:40,195 --> 00:06:44,872 To see human beings do it with grand weaponry and huge formations, that in 94 00:06:44,872 --> 00:06:49,734 itself is just awful to imagine, but to imagine the hidden forces the cosmos 95 00:06:49,734 --> 00:06:53,457 actually dismantling the walls of Troy deeply sinister. 96 00:06:53,457 --> 00:06:56,216 For Homer there is anger and there is rage. 97 00:06:56,216 --> 00:07:01,286 For Virgil there's a kind of existential menace, the whole universe seems to be 98 00:07:01,286 --> 00:07:06,762 kind of operating with behind the scenes forces that sometimes could have deeply 99 00:07:06,762 --> 00:07:11,385 sinister ends to them. Virgil's world is build on a sense that 100 00:07:11,385 --> 00:07:17,096 there may be depths of sinister forces operative in a world that otherwise we as 101 00:07:17,096 --> 00:07:24,225 humans might be ignorant of it's depths. So, we get to see the Troy engulfed in 102 00:07:24,225 --> 00:07:30,936 flames, in this broad sense. And then we get to see Virgil, send Aeneas 103 00:07:30,936 --> 00:07:34,962 out. Virgil brings his father with him, on his 104 00:07:34,962 --> 00:07:41,691 shoulders, and his household gods. Father, coming with him can here would be 105 00:07:41,691 --> 00:07:46,632 a nice representation of Virgil's, sorry, of Aeneus's past and tradition. 106 00:07:46,825 --> 00:07:51,318 He's carrying that forward as a burden to bring that forward with him. 107 00:07:51,318 --> 00:07:55,682 And, he's also guiding his son by the hand, the future in other words, 108 00:07:55,874 --> 00:07:59,148 He's guiding forward into the next stage of things. 109 00:07:59,148 --> 00:08:04,475 Destiny is bringing him forward via his son whereas tradition in the past comes 110 00:08:04,475 --> 00:08:07,620 with him, as his father is up on his shoulders. 111 00:08:07,811 --> 00:08:13,796 Is he then going to breezily march into some new found future with his father and 112 00:08:13,796 --> 00:08:15,324 his son? Well, not at all. 113 00:08:15,324 --> 00:08:19,144 Virgil's world is a world that is characterized by darkness. 114 00:08:19,144 --> 00:08:23,537 It's characterized by shifting surfaces. Be careful as you're reading. 115 00:08:23,537 --> 00:08:28,312 It's a strange world to enter in to. Homer, I think, is quite brightly lit, 116 00:08:28,312 --> 00:08:31,369 most of the time. We get to see what's happening. 117 00:08:31,369 --> 00:08:36,590 Finding all the connections between the things we can obviously see is, is part of 118 00:08:36,590 --> 00:08:40,028 the challenge. For Virgil, there's a difficulty in just 119 00:08:40,028 --> 00:08:43,438 getting at what the even what basically is happening. 120 00:08:43,438 --> 00:08:48,374 There'll be a surface level, there'll always be other levels perating at the 121 00:08:48,374 --> 00:08:51,427 same time. That's happening for Virgil and it's 122 00:08:51,427 --> 00:08:55,908 happening for us as we read the story, It's also happening for Aeneas. 123 00:08:55,908 --> 00:09:01,169 He's not going to be in full command of all the things that are happening around 124 00:09:01,169 --> 00:09:03,897 him. He's being pulled along by this grand 125 00:09:03,897 --> 00:09:08,963 destiny toward a future that he is on his way to, to meet but there'll be lots of 126 00:09:08,963 --> 00:09:13,900 pain, struggles and suffering along the way so watch for these hidden forces.