This kept popping up on Facebook and Twitter the other day … here’s a bit of a tease to get you to check the item out at History Today … nice oppotunity to connect the ancient world with modern with a somewhat different spin than we usually get in those US-as-Rome pieces:
As Libya collapsed into chaos, its cities aflame, its leader filled with bloodlust and its people massing along the Mediterranean in quest of shelter, we perhaps told ourselves we had seen all of this before. Not on the BBC or Al Jazeera, but instead in a half-forgotten Latin class. More than two millennia ago, the Roman poet Virgil sang of arms and the man in his epic poem, the Aeneid. Like Virgil’s hero Aeneas, we are seeking answers to a deadly mayhem that, unwittingly, we in the West have helped create in Libya. […]
… I’m still waiting for the media comparisons of certain leaders in Libya with Jugurtha …
rogueclassicism 