Gratuitous Classical Posting

My quote of the day email guy sends along an entry today which I thought would grab the interest of you Latin geeks out there:

I am greatly enjoying Robert Fagles' accessible new translation of the Aeneid, from which these excerpts are drawn:

Fama, malum qua non aliud velocius ullum:
mobilitate viget irisque adquirit eundo,
parva metu primo, mox sese attollit in auras
ingrediturque solo et caput inter nubila condit.

- Publius Vergilius Maro (Virgil)
(Aeneis, IV, 173)

(Rumor, swiftest of all the evils in the world.
She thrives on speed, stronger for every stride,
slight with fear at first, soon soaring into the air
she treads the ground and hides her head in the clouds.)

Varium et mutabile semper femina.

- Ibid., 569

(Woman's a thing that's always changing, shifting like the wind.)

Facilis descensus Averno:*
noctes atque dies patet atri ianua Ditis:
sed revocare gradum superasque evadere ad auras,
hoc opus, hic labor est.

- Ibid., VI, 126

(...the descent to the underworld is easy.
Night and day the gates of shadowy Death stand open wide,
but to retrace your steps, to climb back to the upper air -
there the struggle, there the labor lies.)

Nescia mens hominum fati sortisque futurae
et servare modum rebus sublata secundis!

- Ibid., X, 501

(How blind men's minds to their fate and to what the future holds,
how blind to limits when fortune lifts men high.)

(Born near today's Mantua, the Roman poet Virgil (70-19 B.C.) studied rhetoric,
history, medicine, mathematics, and philosophy in his youth. Because of the
proscriptions that followed the killing of Julius Caesar, he lost his estates in 42
B.C., but he returned to favor when his verse was discovered by the patrons
Maecenas and Pollio. Virgil spent the last decade if his life working on his epic
poem, the Aeneid, which traced the founding of Rome to a handful of survivors of the sack of Troy, led by the warrior Aeneas. Unfinished at Virgil’s death and intended by him to have been destroyed, the Aeneid was adopted by Augustus Caesar as the official "creation myth" of the Roman state and - preserved for posterity - established the subsequent fame of Virgil as one of the greatest of Roman authors. Book X is the source of perhaps Virgil's best-known line:

"Audentis Fortuna iuvat."

(Fortune speeds the bold.**) )

* N.B. The reference here is to Lake Averno, just north of modern-
day Naples, which was believed in ancient times to be one of the
entrances to the Underworld.

** Often translated, "Fortune favors the brave."

I've got the Fitzgerald translation myself, but this looks quite intriguing.