I'd like to begin today's episode with a land acknowledgement.

This podcast deals with events taking place on land which originally belonged to the Latin peoples and other Italic tribes, such as the Bolski and the Samnites.

Additionally, and perhaps most importantly, we will discuss today the brutal conquest and seizure

of land rightfully belonging to the Ritulians.

And we honor them.

Okay, thank you for holding space with me and honoring the indigenous Latinx peoples of Italy that Aeneas and his Trojan men are now going to cruelly usurp.

They're going to displace them from their home.

Actually, the situation is much, much more complicated and interesting than that.

And I think it's always worth remembering that these conversations,

which in the modern day are so simplistic and full of sloganeering,

this kind of fist waving that we do about,

oh, the beautiful, pure, pristine native peoples who, I don't know,

they just sprung from the earth.

They just live here, right? And we came, we bad Westerners or Europeans or Israelis or whatever the bad people are. We came and we swept them out underneath our conquering feet.

That situation, that is the reality of conquest and the reality of land

changing hands, was very much present in the ancient world. In fact, it was a feature of the

ancient world in a way that it's not so much for many of us lucky moderns. And yet, I'm going to suggest to you, poets like Virgil

and thinkers in the ancient world in general are actually much more sophisticated about these

kinds of issues and about the moral complexities of them than we tend to be. They deal with them. That is, the ancient way of

dealing with this sort of thing, is not through political sloganeering as much as it is through

myth-making and storytelling. And that's, of course, what the Aeneid is all about. And that's not a

surprise to you if you've been following this series. It's a poem about

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