![]() ![]() Until he could found his city and bring his gods ![]() But here, in Stanley Lombardo’s translation, is how Virgil opens his story: Homer seems to share some of his fellow epic poet Hesiod’s sour view that things have gone downhill precipitously since the heroic age, and his explicit emphasis tends to be on discontinuity rather than its opposite. The Greek epics are concerned with a world and people whose links to their classical audience are left implicit whoever Homer was, he makes it clear to us that the action he relates took place a long time ago, and as a narrator he avoids drawing connections between the Danaoi of the poems and the Hellenes of his audience, except to point out a few times that the heroes of the Iliad were able to lift rocks far heavier than anyone could today. It takes Virgil all of five lines into his twelve-book epic to tell his audience that his undertaking is different from Homer’s. Whether he wanted to be or not, Virgil was in the thick of history, and he must have wanted to be, since he never avoided it in any of his works, and he chose for his third and greatest, the Aeneid, no less a story than the imperial city’s mythological founding. What the classical Greeks knew of that world they knew from Homer, which means that Homer’s version of people and events enjoyed, as it still does, the definitiveness of fiction or myth: the legitimacy of the Iliad’s representation of King Agamemnon as an arrogantly boorish fool is not subject to revision in light of new evidence about any real historical Agamemnon, who might to our surprise turn out to have been, say, a wise and lovable commander, and husband, too.īy contrast, we know very well who Virgil was, and when and where he lived: he was an Italian citizen of Rome during the time of its bloody metamorphosis from a republic into the empire of modern imagination. 1 The Greek epics have always been comparatively free of historical setting by the time they emerged in the eighth to seventh centuries BCE the Mycenaean world they purported to depict had long been gone. The Homeric poems report from a misty prehistoric past: we don’t know who Homer was or even if he existed, the historical actuality of the Trojan War is a perennial subject of dispute, and the ancients could not say for sure to what island home his celebrated homecoming brought Odysseus, even if we think we can. But the Aeneid is very different from the other two. All month long XM satellite 65 “The Rhyme” has been promoting “Dogg-vember.” Every so often you’d hear a message from Snoop Dogg promoting his “Welcome to the Church” show, or a week of classic West coast raps, or a song from his new album, or he’d simply say “Tha Blue Carpet Treatment drops November 21st.The Iliad, the Odyssey, and the Aeneid are the holy trinity of classical European epic, and Robert Fagles and Stanley Lombardo, with their recent versions of the Aeneid, have translated all three. That don’t have nothin’ to do with The Rhyme – I just wanted to say that shit.” If this album was promoted as hard on other media outlets as it was on satellite radio then Snoop should have no problem with album sales this week, despite going head up with Jay-Z’s first official album since “retirement” and a brand new posthumous 2Pac album. Snoop traditionally does well anyway thanks to a loyal fanbase that has followed him through thick and thin – label changes, producer changes, a mountain of legal problems and a life that’s got more ups and downs than a roller coaster from hell. Still through almost a dozen albums Snoop has done one thing consistantly with each and every released – charted hits. A lot of people in the last year or two have proclaimed that they are “bringing the West coast back” in their raps, but since Snoop never left, how could the West coast ever leave? He’s been holding this shit down since 1992. With the “Dogg-vember” in full swing it was time for Snoop to do his thing and release another hot single, although “Vato” seemed like a pretty odd choice. ![]() “I was chillin, right around my way (way!) That’s not a knock on the song itself in any way, as The Neptunes knock out one of their most gangster beats while B-Real makes the song feel surreal with his chorus contribution, but it just seemed like way too hard of a song to ever successfully crossover: #Jamie foxx snoop dogg psst full Gįools don’t respect nuttin but the gangbang (bang!) Talkin shit with his homies like he was a straight. ![]()
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