Literature and

history come.

Hello and Hello and welcome to literature in history.

Episode 57, The World Grows Dim and Black.

This is the fourth of four programs on Virgil's Aniid, an epic written in the 20s,

and left incomplete when the poet died in 19 bc.

If you're just jumping in, the story of the Aniid when the poet died in 19 b c.

If you're just jumping in, the story of the Aniad

begins back in episode 54.

Up to this point, we have heard of how Anius escaped Troy, wandered the Aegean for seven years, and landed in the

North African kingdom of the Carthaginian Queen Dido.

We learned how Anius and Dido fell in love, and how after leaving her, Anius went to the

underworld to converse with the spirit of his departed father.

Last time we saw the goddess Juno stirring up trouble in central Italy, Ania sneaking out of the

Trojan camp near the mouth of the Tyber to find more help, and the confederated Italian forces making their first assault on the Trojan base camp.

It is a particularly exciting juncture of the story to jump back into.

Juno knows she cannot stop the founding of Rome, but she wants to inflict as much pain

and death as possible in the meantime.

Anius, pressed by his divine destiny, finds himself having to fight a seemingly impossible war.

And down below the Trojan walls, the Italian champion Turnis and his sadistic Lieutenant Mezentius are eyeing the battered Trojan

fort and determining how they're going to get in. The last three books of the Aniad

are about a full-scale war, a war in which humans and gods fight alongside one

...