Virgil's Aeneid

Virgil's Aeneid

Hubert Dreyfus — 22 recordings in the archive.

The book: The Aeneid by Virgil.

Provenance: University of California, Berkeley · course lectures (Berkeley webcasts).

So I'm trying to tell you really why we're reading the Aeneid and we're only reading the first part of the first four books because they're wood and only spending a week on it not because it's not an important work of art in its own right but we're not really treating it that way all I want to get out of the Aeneid is an understanding of who virgil is and what his views are because in the Divine Comedy virgil shows up and leads dante and dante says lines one particularly important line from virgil in the Divine Comedy and you've got to know that and it's in the reading but we'll see if you recognize it when you get there but and it's important to see the next step in the understanding of being after what we've had so far which was Cruces and PO ASIS and now we're going to get another one and it's an important step the one in virtual what the Roman understanding of being on the way to the Christian understanding of being so we've got a week on the Aeneid and we won't be reading it with the thoroughness that we read Homer and Aeschylus and thinking about every line in the whole book we just want to get the new understanding of being get the geography of the underworld because Dante just takes over everything that Virgil just makes up for the layout of the place where people go after they die he's got a little help from Homer that mostly the Virgil just makes it up on his own as far as I know another and finally we want to read at the very end of the Aeneid the deification of Augustus as another step on the way from polytheism to monotheism the I don't want to give you much historical background because that's not what I'm good at and anything you could find it in any book but I just give you the barest facts and that is that Virgil was a Roman poet he was a friend Gustus Caesar was the first emperor of Rome and I know it's gonna happen oh I know at least I recognize it they're sowing some tree down outside this should we close the door shall we just put up with it let's say you know don't do it close the…