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Literary Analysis Of The First Ten Lines Of The Aeneid

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Tilson Young ENGL – 2013 – G- European Civilization: Literature Dr. Myers 11/20/17 Literary Analysis of the First Ten Lines of the Aeneid The first 10 lines of the Aeneid set the stage for the entire poem. To fully understand these lines of poetry, you must first understand not only the actual literary meaning, but also the historical context, the theme, the allusion to other texts, and the biographical relevance of the poem to fully, in depth understand the poem. The works by Vergil, more specifically The Aeneid, has been called “Vergil’s best-known work and Roman literature by the Romans of his day, and the fluidity of its vivid portrayals of human emotion have earned it a legacy as one the greatest poems in the Latin language.” (Mastin) This shows not only was Vergil an important figure in Greek times but also is an important literary figure in modern time as well. The first 10 lines of the poem, translated by C. Day Lewis, is as follows: Arms, and the man I sing, who, fore’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 desin’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. (Virgil) To fully understand the context of these lines, we must first look at the historical context of the lines. The Romans generally did not create myth but expanded on it and added their own take on it. Vergil, however, was above all the writers of the period. An interesting point to be made here is that poets of the day where also in some sense the historians too. This shows that historically speaking, poets could choose what portions of history they used, and which portions they made become mythology. But the importance of literature and more exactly, the Aeneid, was so important to the Roman Empire that the presence of Aeneid graffiti in a certain location indicates a school there. (Syed) Also during this period of time in ancient Greece, there was major political and societal change in the midst. With the fall of the Roman Empire and

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