Caesar, Virgil, and The Aeneid with Dr. Pavlos Papadopoulos
The After Dinner Scholar
When Aeneas visits the underworld in Virgil's Aeneid, he sees great heroes who have died and great heroes yet to be born. Here is Caesar, and all the offspring of Julus destined to live under the pole of heaven. This is the man, this is him, whom you so often hear promised you, Augustus Caesar, son of the Deified, who will make a Golden Age again in the fields where Saturn once reigned, and extend the empire beyond the Libyans and the Indians....” It’s no surprise that Virgil wrote such extravagant praise of Caesar Augustus into his epic. After all, Caesar Augustus gave him the job of creating the founding myth of the Roman Empire that had supplanted the Roman Republic. As he has been teaching The Aeneid to our Wyoming Catholic College sophomores, Dr. Pavlos Papadopoulos has been thinking a great deal about that transition.