Of The Great Ancients, 'n Such

[BAREister]

HRFF thinx, no, make that he KNOWS our natures haven't changed a WHIT from time immemorial, though we indulge heavily in the conceits they/it have/has. The squalid horrors of World Wars I and II should have put an end to THAT...and once and FURall , too, but they didn't.

 

The BARE seeks solace in the beauty of ancient poetry and mythology and peruses its history, in a feeble attempt to steep himself, belatedly, in the classics. lASST evening he read about Tiberius, successor to Augustus, who died lonely and broken, a man out of joint with his corrupt time, overwhelmed by his beknighted fellow man.

But that is a tale FUR anUDDER post.

 

Tonight, HRFF will quote the poet, described ass "pietistic, moralistic, chauvanistic, imperialistic and propagandist" by the Durants, who, in asking why he became ageless, and beloved by man throughout the successive millenia, at least, until our more recently banal and under-educated age, responded: "because we feel that his ympathies have spread from his own fair Italy to all men, even to all life."

 

Ironically, perhaps fittingly, Virgil died "sunstruck".

 

Another literary giant of an age gone by, possessed of FUR greater? sophistication and wit than our own, Voltaire, said of Virgil's greatest work, the Aeneid, from which the following passage is taken, that it "was the finest literary monument left us by antiquity".

 

Whether those of you conversant with the poet agree, or SNOT, here is a passage that leapt from the pages on the death of Pallas, ass befitting our currently most parlous and recklessly self-indulgent time, or, so thot The BARE:

 

"Ah, spirit of man, ignorant of fate or the allotted future, OR TO KEEP BOUNDS WHEN ELATE WITH PROSPERITY!"

 

(emphasis added by HRFF)

[Guest sigmoidoscope]

No man should so act as to make a gain out of the ignorance of another.

 

- Cicero

[TGakaTheBigHurt]

Bare,

 

you've been reading too much Adam Hamilton over at www.zealllc.com

[TGakaTheBigHurt]

Bare,

 

you've been reading too much Adam Hamilton over at www.zealllc.com

[machinehead]

Bare, your avatar Churchill already described the path we're on:

 

"I have watched this famous Island descending incontinently, fecklessly, the stairway which leads to a dark gulf. It is a fine broad stairway at the beginning but after a bit the carpet ends. A little farther on, there are only flag stones, a little farther on still, these flag stones break beneath your feet. If mortal catastrophe should overtake the British Nation, historians a thousand years hence will never understand how it was that the victorious nation suffered themselves to cast away all that they had gained by measureless sacrifice. Now the victors are vanquished and those who threw down their arms are striding on to world mastery."

[BAREister]

whooze Adam Hamilton?