The Poem That Makes a Robot

The contrast is clean. Homer believes love is the unifying force of the universe. Source trail 0:061:38 We conclude Virgil's the Iliad today and as we've discussed Virgil is very much the anti Homer and so what the Iliad is It's really a response to the Iliad and the Odyssey remember Homer believes that love is the unifyi...of Rome, which is Ineos's mission and purpose and So our role our responsibility our duty in life is just to follow this path of the gods And then the world will be perfect Okay, um This will the the Iliad will create t... Virgil believes piety is. Love gives life, purpose, and hope; piety obeys the gods, the father, and the divine plan. In the Aeneid those are competing forces. You cannot love and be fully pious at the same time, because the path of the gods is the founding of Rome.

The claim then widens into a civilizational story. Source trail 1:383:04 of Rome, which is Ineos's mission and purpose and So our role our responsibility our duty in life is just to follow this path of the gods And then the world will be perfect Okay, um This will the the Iliad will create t...course is Dante Okay, and thought they will destroy the Roman Empire and the Catholic Church with his Masterpiece the divine comedy we will spend the rest of the semester Reading the divine comedy. It's not something yo... The Aeneid creates Rome, Rome becomes the Catholic Church, and for a millennium elite children memorize Virgil until they see the world through him. Virgil becomes the organizing god of a conformist order. Dante appears as the destroyer of that empire, the poet who will liberate the human imagination through the Divine Comedy.

That is why reading has to slow down. Source trail 3:044:05 course is Dante Okay, and thought they will destroy the Roman Empire and the Catholic Church with his Masterpiece the divine comedy we will spend the rest of the semester Reading the divine comedy. It's not something yo...Okay, so we read the my comedy line by line And we'll try to really understand it but again, the point of this class is not to Tell you what the book great books are the entire point of the class is to get you excited a... A great poem is not a message to skim; each line can be an eternal truth that takes a life to understand. The point of the class is not to finish Homer, Virgil, and Dante as if they were assignments. It is to enter a journey that outlives the course.

The Dido scene gives the test case. Source trail 5:126:226:38 Dido falls in love with the fact that Aeneas is not just a great warrior and very handsome, but also because he's a great storyteller. He tells her the story of the fall of Troy. And the two fall in love and Dido has th...This is not your duty. Do your duty. So this is where we are in the story. So let us read. Ivory, can you read please? Aeneas has fallen in love in Carthage, but Mercury arrives with the imperial command: stop doting on your wife, stop building Carthage, remember Ascanius and Italy. The god's message is brutally simple. This is not your duty. Do your duty.

A Homeric Aeneas would be emotionally torn because he loves Dido. Source trail 7:328:159:33 You owe him Italy's realm, the land of Rome. There's order still on his lips, the god vanished from sight into empty air. Then Aeneas was truly overwhelmed by the vision, stunned, his hackles bristle with fear, his voic...Okay, so again, Virgil is the anti -Homer. And what I mean by that is that if Homer were Aeneas, then what Homer would emphasize is how emotionally conflicted Aeneas is, because he loves Dido. He does not want to go. Fo... The choice between Rome and Carthage would not be a problem of logistics but a problem of God. Love is above the gods because God is love, and there is a candle in the human being that strives to return to the light. Given Dido or empire, Homer chooses Dido. Odysseus refuses Calypso's immortality because his home is Penelope.

Virgil's Aeneas has another conflict. Source trail 9:3310:32 And when he returns to Penelope, Penelope asks him, will you ever leave me again? And he says, never again will I leave you, because this is my home. Love is where my heart is. Okay? So this is the... But what the confl...And then, well, who cares what happens afterwards? All right? So this is... So the thing to notice is this is not human. Okay? There is nothing human about Aeneas. What he is, is he's like a walking phallus, almost. He'... He fears the anger of the gods, wants to obey, and mainly needs to figure out how to leave without Dido stopping him. This is not a tragic lover trying to reconcile duty and affection. It is a mission man looking for the cleanest exit. He will pretend nothing happened and sneak away at night.

Even creativity gets recoded. Source trail 12:2012:4413:53 are rigging out their galleys gearing to set sail she rages in and she rages in helpless frenzy blazing through the entire city raving like some may may not driven wild when the women shake the sacred emblem when the cy...sitharon echoes round with maddened midnight cries okay all right so certain things to notice okay um bacchus is the god of creativity of um god of creativity for the greeks so there's actually two gods of creativity in... The Greeks have Apollo and Bacchus: calm rational creativity and emotional, drunken, rapturous creativity. Both are needed for human fullness. Virgil turns the Bacchic side into the danger itself. Frenzy is no longer one part of the soul's creative range; it is madness.

Dido names the pledge sealed by their hands. Source trail 14:1914:3915:53 I laughed she assails Aeneas before he said a word. So, you traitor, you really believed you'd keep this a secret, this great outrage. Steal away in silence from my shores. Can nothing hold you back? Not our love, not t...Okay, stop, okay, all right. So, this line, not the pledge when sealed with our right hands, this is an allusion, of course, to, um, right here, okay? This is an allusion, of course, to the Odyssey, where Odysseus and P... That phrase carries the Odyssey behind it: Odysseus and Penelope are joined by a memory and a bond that survive twenty years of distance. In Homer, the pledge resurrects the marriage. In Virgil, Aeneas hears only words. What matters is not the bond with Dido but the oath to the gods.

Here the Odyssey is inverted at the level of structure. Source trail 16:0016:5617:0018:17 Why labor to rigor fleet when the winter's raw, to risk the deep wind north winds closing in? You crawl, heartless. Even if you were not pursuing alien fields and unknown homes, even if ancient Troy were still standing,...In whose hands, my guest, do you leave me here to meet my death? Odysseus's journey ends at home, with Penelope, love, and a restored self. The Aeneid begins with love and then demands its abandonment. Dido's love does not rebuild her identity. It costs her pride, reputation, people, and finally selfhood.

The human answer would be pity: apology, return, some promise that the damage matters. Aeneas gives the opposite answer. He denies the marriage, says he would rather have rebuilt Troy if fate allowed it, and names Italy as his new love. The argument underneath is power. Love gets in the way. Dido is in the way. Therefore love must be discarded. Lens point story-control A story makes an imperial robot when repeated inhabitation teaches the reader to discard love, pity, decency, and human hesitation as weakness until obedience to mission feels like inner piety rather than outside command. Source trail 22:09 All right, so what he's saying is this. Ditto. If it were up to me, I wouldn't say it would be, I wouldn't say it would be either, okay? If it were up to me, I would be back in Troy, dying and fighting and dying for wha...

Homeric love gives strength. Source trail 24:0725:0325:3326:46 And now, what shall I do? Make a mockery of myself. Go back to my old suitors. Tempt them to try again. Beg the Numidian's, grovel, plead for a husband though time and again I score into what they're like would then tri...see once more command them to spread their sails to the winds no no die you deserve it and your pain with the sword you my sister you were the first one over by my tears to pile these sorrows on my shoulders mad as I wa... Odysseus touches the bow after twenty years and the memory returns him to himself. Virgilian love does the opposite. Dido begins as a proud queen and ends as a woman considering whether to beg the Trojans to carry her as a slave girl, if only she can remain near Aeneas. Love becomes disintegration.

Aeneas sleeps peacefully while her grief breaks. Source trail 26:4627:2627:3127:41 She's seriously considering being a slave girl if it just means being near Aeneas. And ultimately, she decides, no, my only option is to die, okay? All right. So she is contemplating killing herself. And the gods know t...Such terrible grief kept breaking from her heart as Aeneas slept in peace on his ship's high stern. That is the tell. He was never in love with her; she was a plaything. The gods make sure he leaves before seeing the suicide. The imperial mission does not have to look at the body it produces.

Then the private ruin becomes political myth. Source trail 29:0130:0130:34 You, sun, whose fires scan all works of the earth. And you, Juno, the witness, midwife to my agonies. He came greeted by nightly shrieks at city crossroads. And you, you avenging furies and gods of dying Dido. Hear me....And you, my Tyrians, harry with hatred all his line, his race to come. Make that offering to my ashes. Send it down below. No love between our peoples. Ever. No Pax Apis. Come rising up from my bones, you avengers still... Dido curses Aeneas and commands endless war between her people and his. Virgil can now explain Rome's destruction of Carthage as necessity. Rome did not burn a rival civilization out of savagery; Carthage was bound by Dido's curse to seek vengeance.

That is the propaganda mechanism. Source trail 31:5633:08 So she and some refugees sought refuge in Northern Africa. So they found the city of Carthage. And they worked really hard to build the city. And she was very attractive. So she won the attention of some local warlords....Okay? So it's basically inversion. So that's what the Aeneid is doing. It's inverting Homer, but it's also inverting history to serve the political purposes of Rome. In Carthage's own memory, Dido is the founder who would rather die than submit, and her sacrifice makes a free and proud people. In the Aeneid, her love for Aeneas becomes poison. It poisons her soul and then her people. Rather than giving them freedom, she enslaves them to revenge. Virgil is inverting Homer, but he is also inverting history.

The Dido story inverts the Odyssey. Source trail 33:23 Alright. So we come to the ending of the Aeneid. So with the story of Dido, what Virgil is doing is inverting the story of the Odyssey. Now we come to the ending of the Aeneid. And here, Virgil is going to invert the st... The ending inverts the Iliad. In Homer, Achilles kills Hector and then is saved from the curse of power by Priam's love. The old enemy comes, begs, grieves, and the killer becomes human enough to cry with him. Love redeems and saves.

Virgil stages the same materials and reverses them. Source trail 36:0537:0737:3238:5339:35 As he hangs back, the fatal spear of Aeneas streaks on, spotting a lucky opening he had flung from a distance, all his might and main. Rocks heaved by a catapult, pounding city ramparts never storm so loudly, never such...some care for a parent's grief can touch you still, I pray you, you had such a father in old Antris, pity Adonis in his old age and send me back to my own people, or if you would prefer, send them my dead body stripped... Turnus is wounded and begs for mercy with Priam's words: remember a father's grief, go no further down the road of hatred. Aeneas hesitates. He has already won. Turnus is defeated, disgraced, and no longer dangerous in the same way. The moral test is whether pity can stop the sword.

Then Aeneas sees Pallas's belt. Source trail 39:3539:5440:1841:04 Aeneas, ferocious in armor, stood there, still, shifting his gaze, and held his sword arm back, holding himself back, too, as Tarnas's words began to sway him more and more, when all at once he caught sight of the faith...Wait, sorry, Pallas, Pallas is the version of Patroclus. Remember how Patroclus died and that enraged Achilles. Well, Pallas is a friend of Aeneas who fell in battle to Tarnas. And Tarnas, to celebrate his victory over... Pallas is the Patroclus figure, the dead friend whose memory can become an excuse for vengeance. Aeneas flares up and kills Turnus. The poem ends there. Not because Virgil forgot catharsis, but because this is the catharsis of empire. Aeneas has changed.

Before this moment the gods had to keep correcting him. Venus stops him from killing Helen. A sign around his son tells him to leave Troy. Mercury has to drag him away from Dido. At the end no god needs to appear. Aeneas supplies the command himself. He recognizes that mercy would be human, and he kills because duty requires it. That is the epiphany: I must abandon all pity, all emotions, my own soul, if I am to serve the gods. Lens point story-control A story makes an imperial robot when repeated inhabitation teaches the reader to discard love, pity, decency, and human hesitation as weakness until obedience to mission feels like inner piety rather than outside command. Source trail 43:46 You must fulfill the mission. Again, when Aeneas is with Dido, he just wants to stay with Dido and build up Carthage. And so Jupiter has to send a messenger, Mercury, to tell him, no, Aeneas, no. Go to Italy, okay? So e...

The power of the Aeneid is not that it states a doctrine and asks for agreement. It makes the reader become Aeneas. In a world where elite education means memorized poetry, to memorize the Aeneid is to travel Aeneas's path: discard humanity, discard the desire to love, discard pity and decency, and become fully pious. The human becomes a robot. Lens point story-control A story makes an imperial robot when repeated inhabitation teaches the reader to discard love, pity, decency, and human hesitation as weakness until obedience to mission feels like inner piety rather than outside command. Source trail 45:07 He is now the perfect soldier. And that's why Virgil wrote the Aenead. Because it is a piece of propaganda. It's a piece of brainwashing, indoctrination, where you read it and you go on the same journey as Aeneas. And s...

A student asks the necessary question. Source trail 46:3947:14 Yeah, I think it's true that like Aeneas, he didn't fail and proceed towards Ternus because he killed him later. But I mean, I think that is still because like he loved Pallas, his friend, who was killed by Ternus. So t...Okay, yeah. All right. That's a good point, okay? So, your point is, well, Aeneas loves his friend, Pallas. And as a result, it's his love for Pallas that drives Aeneas to kill Ternus, right? That's fine. That makes sen... Isn't Aeneas still moved by love for Pallas? Isn't that emotion part of why Turnus dies? Jiang grants the surface and rejects the premise. Achilles also kills Hector after Patroclus dies, but then collapses because he knows revenge does not honor love.

The hard claim is that you do not avenge someone you love by killing someone. If you truly love a person, you do not turn that person's memory into hatred and violence. You celebrate the person's life by becoming open and generous with others. If your best friend were killed, love would mean forgiveness. That is not intuitive here because this is a world educated in utility, obedience, and compliance, not in love Lens point story-control A story makes an imperial robot when repeated inhabitation teaches the reader to discard love, pity, decency, and human hesitation as weakness until obedience to mission feels like inner piety rather than outside command. Source trail 48:3249:52 If you do something evil, it means you actually don't want to love that person. Okay? Does that make sense to you? If you truly love Patroclus as a person, you would not use him as an excuse to kill someone. All right?...Okay? And that's what the great books are about. The great books, even Homer and Dante, they really think deeply about what love is because in love is where God is. All right? Okay? So again, by asking this question, wh... .

That is why Dante is waiting at the end of the lecture. Source trail 49:5250:59 Okay? And that's what the great books are about. The great books, even Homer and Dante, they really think deeply about what love is because in love is where God is. All right? Okay? So again, by asking this question, wh...All right. So let me explain the plan for the Divine Comedy, which we will end the semester with. Okay? So there'll be four lectures on the Divine Comedy. So I'll be doing a lecture every two weeks. All right? And then... Homer and Dante think deeply about love because love is where God is. Virgil's poem trains obedience. The Divine Comedy will have to retrain perception itself, so that love no longer looks like weakness and forgiveness no longer looks like failure.