Currently Reading, Roman Poetry edition

Metamorphoses, Ovid
Eclogues, Virgil
Odes, Horace

The loudest voices for 'classical culture' or 'the Western Tradition' have usually spent the least time engaging with it. I know someone has not really read the Iliad if they do not mention the catalogue of the ships, everybody's least favorite part that stops the narrative propulsion of Book I dead in its tracks. There's a sense, usually false, that there's something nobler or better in old things just because they're old. Ovid attempts to fold Egyptian gods into Roman myth while simultaneously denigrating Cleopatra and the weird icky foreignness of Egypt, how dare those people think they could control Rome? Even the people who know each other and are friendly--Horace and Virgil, as an example--are often enough writing to completely contrary purposes for different reasons. As I approach 35 years of reading in the canon I become more convinced than ever that it is only the effort to make a canon that allows one to exist, not unlike making a sandcastle: just enough to hold them together provided you don't stress any of the connections too much.

More pointedly:

My edition of Ovid from the library is a midcentury Signet Classic edition, where the translator includes a half-page precis of each book with many contemporary allusions to work now mostly unknown; whether this indicates the shortsightedness of the translator or the general decline in educational standards is left as an exercise to the reader. But the one insightful thing he points on, on Book XV, is that the political aims of the Metamorphoses fail: all cannot be integrated into the Roman ideal; Augustus is praised for the peace he brings, but as we know, the subsequent fall of Rome begins with his death. In this way it's not unlike Plato, except one wonders how much the failure of the poetic project's political aims is intentional.

Virgil's Eclogues are superior to the Aeneid as a subject of interest, unless you want to read about people being killed in gruesome ways, and yet they are clearly a minor and inferior work of art. The tone, though, is interesting--conversational in a way Roman poetry is not usually represented as being.

Horace is great, but one can only read so many "hey man, it's gonna be okay, just try to take things as they come" poems in a row.