Shadi Bartsch: evaluation

Transcript context

…Is Virgil, in fact, the greatest political philosopher of ancient Rome? I will pause for a second over that one. You’re leaving out the Greeks, which helps me answer the question. I have a feeling I’m going to get a lot of flak on this, but I would say yes, because, like Aristotle, he understands that sometimes poetry is truer than truth, and also because he manages both to represent a political ideology and to show how a political ideology is created at the same time, thereby undermining what he’s shown us how to do. I think that is very interesting. He also lets us see how — possibly at Augustus’s insistence — the figure of Aeneas, the hero, is changed from somebody who did not have a good reputation — in fact, in some of the earlier stories, he was a traitor who betrayed Troy to the Greeks — he shows us how this figure is transformed in his own poem to a heroic figure. It’s just as if we were to say, “Gosh, let’s think of Mussolini, the fascist Mussolini with a dubious history suddenly becomes in power.” At that point, all the stories being told about Mussolini are stories of victory and goodness and the triumph of the second coming of Rome and so forth. Then once he’s gone, that all becomes critical again. The discourse is always dependent on who’s got the microphone at the moment, as it were. You may not agree with this, but many readers I speak with tend to think that Homer is somehow deeper, more mystical, or just more fun to read than Virgil. What accounts for that perception and how might you challenge it?…

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