Who Says You Can't Go Home? Virgil Does.
Young Heretics
Spencer Klavan
4.9 • 4.5K Ratings
🗓️ 11 April 2025
⏱️ 61 minutes
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Summary
It's time to embark on Book III of the Aeneid, and with it a mini-Odyssey. But there's a catch: Odysseus had home waiting for him at the end of all his wanderings. Aeneas has left home behind him, and he can never return. This episode is about why that's so important--for Virgil, for Augustus, for Rome at the dawn of its imperial age, and for America on the verge of its 250th birthday. Plus: my daily routine does not involve rubbing banana peel on my face. But it does involve the liturgy of the hours. 100/10 would recommend!
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Well, you guys, I got to admit it. |
| 0:02.0 | I spent 20 years trying to get out of this place. |
| 0:05.0 | I was looking for something. |
| 0:07.0 | I couldn't replace. |
| 0:09.0 | I've been there, done that, but I ain't looking back on the seeds I've sown. |
| 0:14.0 | Saving dimes, spending too much time on the telephone. |
| 0:19.0 | Who says you can't go home? |
| 0:29.2 | Virgil! Virgil! Virgil says you can't go home. At least, not in the way you might |
| 0:34.3 | long to. You can never go back to your past. You can never undo what's been done. |
| 0:39.3 | That is, I think, the melancholy truth that Virgil is always reflecting on, and especially in book three, which is the book that we have now arrived at. |
| 0:51.3 | I am back to my Aeneid series. I'm glad to have you with me on this journey. We've just |
| 0:57.3 | closed out book two, which was the end of the Trojan story. Remember that Troy has been |
| 1:04.2 | burned by the Greeks, a la the Iliad. After the Iliad closes, the Greeks win the war. Troy is burned, and Aeneas is one of the few |
| 1:14.6 | that escapes. In fact, he finds a whole crew kind of waiting for him on the shore in |
| 1:20.1 | sort of the same way that Dido did. It's another parallel between Aeneas and Queen Dido |
| 1:26.5 | of Carthage, setting them up for their love affair in books to come. |
| 1:31.3 | But this journey, the journey away from Troy and toward Rome, is fated. |
| 1:36.3 | It's been marked out by the gods ever since the Iliad. |
| 1:39.3 | In Homer, Poseidon says that Aeneas has been marked out for a grander destiny than to die in Troy, |
| 1:46.0 | which he kind of wants to do. He's not the most stoked about not dying. He actually would |
| 1:52.0 | like to die a hero's death here, but there are even bigger things on his horizon. And so |
| 1:57.0 | Virgil is now broadening out the story away from and above what Homer was telling, which is very much on purpose. |
... |
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