Western Literature week 8
Aeneid
EPIC BY VIRGIL
Aeneid, Latin epic poem
written from about 30 to 19 BCE by
the Roman poet Virgil. Composed in hexameters, about 60 lines of which were left unfinished at
his death, the Aeneid incorporates the various legends of Aeneas and
makes him the founder of Roman greatness. The work is organized into 12 books
that relate the story of the legendary founding of Lavinium (parent
town of Alba Longa and
of Rome). The town is founded by Aeneas, who was informed
as he left the burning ruins of Troy that
it was his fate to found a new city with a glorious destiny in the West.
The Book of Psalms, commonly referred to simply as Psalms or "the Psalms", is the first book of
the Ketuvim ("Writings"), the third
section of the Hebrew Bible, and a book of the Christian Old Testament.The title is derived from the Greek
translation, ψαλμοί psalmoi, meaning "instrumental
music" and, by extension, "the words accompanying the music."
The book is an anthology of individual psalms, with 150 in the Jewish
and Western Christian tradition and more in the Eastern Christian churches.
Many of the psalms are linked to the name of King David, although his authorship is not accepted by some
modern Bible scholars.
Psalm 23
George W. Bush and the gospel of freedom and liberty
On the evening of Sept. 11,
2001, George W. Bush quoted Psalm 23, declared the day’s events to be the
opening salvo in a cosmic struggle against evil, and vowed that the nation
would “go forward to defend freedom and all that is good and just in our world.”
Pygmalion
Pygmalion, in Greek mythology, a king who was the father of Metharme and, through her
marriage to Cinyras, the grandfather of Adonis, according to Apollodorus of Athens. The Roman poet Ovid, in his Metamorphoses, Book X, relates that Pygmalion, a sculptor, makes an ivory statue representing
his ideal of womanhood
and then falls in love with his own creation, which he names Galatea;
the goddess Venus
brings the statue to life in answer to his prayer. Their daughter Paphos gives
her name to the city of Paphos,
the center of Aphrodite’s worship on Cyprus. The story was the inspiration for many artists: Jean-Léon Gérôme depicted
the moment of transformation, and George Bernard Shaw’s Pygmalion in
turn provided the basis of Alan Jay Lerner and Frederick Loewe’s musical, My Fair Lady.
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