In our age of ignorance, bigotry, and superstition, few persons have any appreciation for the glorious classical literature of ancient Greece and Rome. Today even classical scholars pay little attention to the vital heart of Lucretius’s De rerum natura. What schoolboy today sings passages from Juvenal? What adult knows of the Sabine women’s founding of gynocentrism in Rome? Who now recognizes Cicero’s wit and wisdom? For a rebirth of enlightenment, students must skip the involuted, ossified scholasticism of today’s academia. They must imitate the imaginative, fully committed appropriations of classical literature that have miraculously survived from medieval Italy.
A unique story collection from the fifteenth century has preserved the classical response of an ordinary, unlearned man in medieval Italy. The narrator recounted:
A unique story collection from the fifteenth century has preserved the classical response of an ordinary, unlearned man in medieval Italy. The narrator recounted:A certain neighbor of mine, a simple man, heard one of those singers at the end of his performance announce, in order to lure back his audience, that the next day he would recite The Death of Hector. This friend of mine, before he would allow the singer to leave, obtained by cash payment a promise that the singer would not so soon kill off the manly, beneficial warrior Hector.
