Classicist says quote of Virgil’s inscribed on 9/11 Memorial is “shockingly inappropriate” » MobyLives
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Next month the National September 11 Memorial Museum will open. On a bare concrete wall that separates visitors from a repository holding the unidentified remains of victims of the September 11 attacks, is a quote of Virgil’s: “ No day shall erase you from the memory of time .” From end to end, the sentence stretches 60 feet. Each of the 15-inch letters is made of steel appropriated from the wreckage. Read against the backdrop of the cool, gray, towering concrete wall, the sentiment is one of solemnity, remembrance; at first glance, Virgil’s words seem a fitting commemorative for the lives lost that day. But put back in the literary context from which it was pulled—Book 9 of the Aeneid—the quote becomes somewhat more macabre.
As the New York Times ‘ David W. Dunlap points out, Virgil’s “you” actually refers to the characters, Nisus and Euryalus, two warrior-lovers who “have just slaughtered the enemy in an orgy of violence, skewering soldiers whom [they] ambushed in their sleep.” And for this massacre, Nisus and Euryalus are killed, their heads impaled on spears. Of the inscription at the 9/11 Memorial Museum, Helen Morales, a classicist at the University of California, Santa Barbara, told the Times, “If we take into account its original context, the quotation is more applicable to the aggressors in the 9/11 tragedy than those honored by the memorial…So my first reaction is that the quotation is shockingly inappropriate for the U.S. victims of the 9/11 attack.”
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