In message <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>,
David Wilson-Okamura <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> writes
>From: "Ramon Sevilla" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
>Date: Thu, 10 Dec 1998 19:31:17 -0600
>
>Forsan et haec olim meminisse iuvabit . Aeneid I, 203.
>
>I marvel how Virgil in Aeneid I, 195 ss. recalls the hardships he and his
>comrades have formerly endured. He doesn�t mention anything successful or
>prosperous. However sharing wine with his company Aeneas speaks hopefully
>looking forward to a future prosperity which will be the effect of a
>painful parturition. Furthermore Aeneas refers to a deity "sine nomine",
>an unknown god: Dabit deus his quoque finem.
>
>Is it appropriate to find out here something akin to a biblical Anamnesis?
>
>David R. Slavitt writes about the fourth book of the Georgics, that it is a
>book "already nudging at the limits of nature... he (Virgil) is
>deliberately venturing beyond the borders of ordinary experience and into
>the realm of the supernatural. Or, putting it another way, he is exploring
>the confines of reason and stepping, or leaping, beyond and into the
>territory of faith". D.R. Slavitt, Virgil, Yale University Press,1991.
>
>I wonder what does Virgil mean when he mentions an unnamed god as in
>Georgics I {immo 4] 221: deum namque ire per omnia. Or in Aeneid I,
199: dabit
>deus his quoque finem.
Unspecified _deus_ in Vergil may mean, at any given point, either the
all-pervasive god of the Stoics and other philosophers or the indefinite
_daimon_ ('some god, but who knows which one?') of Homer.
--
Leofranc Holford-Strevens
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