Virgil
Natalie Haynes Stands Up for the Classics
BBC
4.8 • 598 Ratings
🗓️ 18 February 2020
⏱️ 28 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
Natalie Haynes, critic, writer and reformed stand-up comedian, brings the ancient world entertainingly up to date.
In each episode, she profiles a figure from ancient Greece or Rome and creates a stand-up routine around them. She then goes in search of the links which make the ancient world still very relevant in the 21st century. For starters, Natalie considers the work of the Roman poet Virgil, ranging from his hints on bee-keeping to his great work The Aeneid.
Dido is the classic wronged woman and the Aeneid contains the best ding-dong between a man and a woman in all Latin literature, culminating in Dido’s memorable promise “If you go I’m going to kill myself and then I will pursue you from beyond death with black fires!”
With Pamela Helen Stephen who's sung Dido in Purcell's Dido and Aeneas, bee-keeper Gordon Cutting and Dr Llewelyn Morgan who talks about the greatest poet in the Roman world. Producer: Christine Hall.
First broadcast on BBC Radio 4 in April 2014.
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | He scored goals, lifted trophies and broken records along the way. |
| 0:05.4 | And now he's got a podcast. |
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| 0:30.2 | Hello, and thank you very much for coming. |
| 0:32.3 | Today, I'd like to talk to you about the Roman poet Virgil. |
| 0:42.5 | Thank you. you about the Roman poet Virgil. So Virgil was born in Mantua, in North Italy, in 70 BC. |
| 0:47.1 | His childhood, his youth would have been coloured therefore by Civil War, the end of the Republic, |
| 0:51.6 | Cleopatra, Anthony, Pompey, Crassus, Julius Caesar, dying on |
| 0:56.2 | their infamy, infamy, they've all got it, and so on. That's his childhood, and his family is |
| 1:01.9 | impoverished by it. They have their land given to veterans, which happens to lots of people. |
| 1:05.8 | And so Virgil's early work, his earliest big poem, the Eclogs, bucolic, it's out, is a sort of big pian to the joy and beauty of the countryside, because obviously he grew up there and felt that it had been sort of taken from him. He eventually becomes very rich, by the way, so I don't feel too bad for him. He's such a good poet. People keep making him gifts and leaving him legacies, and that is the best way to get rich, so he's very wealthy when he dies. He becomes a client of Mycinas, the great patron of the arts in the first |
| 1:32.9 | century BC. Mycinas is patron of Propercius, the love poet of Horace, obviously out of being |
| 1:39.1 | Horace, love poet, satirist, letter writer, general super Horace, and of Virgil. |
| 1:45.3 | The opening chunk of The Georgics, his second great poem, is dedicated to Mycinas. |
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