Started working on a project I have in one of my Latin classes. Read and did some comparisons between the Aeneid and Dante’s Inferno.
First, I was wondering, Virgil wrote from the future of the past as if it was the future (when Aeneas goes down to the underworld and his father walks him through the future of Rome and his offspring to encourage him to go on with his journey). Dante wrote about the present/past from the present. But doesn’t that even out the tenses? Since, technically, Virgil was writing about the past/ present from the present…
Second, in Virgil, guard dog Cerberus is thrown a drugged cake to not attack Sibyll and Aeneas, but in the Inferno, Virgil throws him mud. Why the difference?
Third, I was thinking, could Dante’s Comedy be seen as a corrective mythology? I need to think about this more, flesh it out.
No comments:
Post a Comment