Jack from Online

the author's framing perplexingly acknowledges the Roman civil wars but seems to suggest that they were about the subjugation and provincialization of Greeks, a process that had been underway for well over a century before Octavian defeated Antony and Cleopatra at Actium

calling Aeneas "a man memorable in the Iliad only for surviving the war" is massively misleading given the role of Aeneas in the wider Homeric tradition. he gets an entire Homeric Hymn (quite likely the oldest of the corpus!) dedicated to his birth story. Vergil did not somehow pluck a minor character from obscurity and Aeneas already had a significant mythological tradition surrounding him both in Greece and in Rome when Vergil produced the Aeneid.

calling the Aeneid "one of the great heists in literary history" is similarly a massive oversimplification that relies on the idea of one-way cultural transmission that can only be framed as theft, rather than a centuries-long process of cultural exchange between Roman, Etruscan, Italic, and Greek peoples in Italy and the wider Mediterranean. this is not to deny the imperialism inherent in the Aeneid, but to suggest that the idea that the Greeks "have" culture and the Romans "steal" it is a pernicious oversimplification akin to "white Americans have no culture" that doesn't actually amount to a real anti-imperialist critique of Roman culture

is suggesting that Lin-Manuel Miranda "turn[ing] the Founding Fathers black" is somehow parallel to Vergil making Homeric myth Roman a useful rhetorical move? how might that be a problematic framing, given both the mass enslavement of Greeks and Greek-speakers in the context of Late Republican/Augustan Rome and the mass enslavement of Black Africans in the transatlantic slave trade? is that really the parallel you want to double down on?

Please consider increasing your contribution to The Sameer Project. They have several campaigns on Chuffed that support different areas across Gaza. I encourage you to choose any campaign and contribute regularly, increasing your donation whenever you are able to.

▪ Agedum, Berte. Indue hoc. ▪ Erneste, cur aenum ponere in capite meo debeo?

▪ Come on, Bert. Put this on. ▪ Ernie, why should I put a pot on my head?