Meggie Macdonald

In a surprising bit of news this morning, the British Museum has announced that a rare gold coin – one of only two known to exist – depicting Brutus, one of Caesar’s assassins, will go on display at the Museum to mark the 2, 054th anniversary of the assassination.

The second of the two gold coins is believed, by experts at the British Museum, to be a forgery so this coin is rightly considered to be a unique addition on loan to the collections.

Brutus would likely have minted these gold and silver denarii in 43 or 42 BC to pay his soldiers.  It is very unusual for a coin to bear the likeness of a living person, something that Susan Headley from About.com sees as counter-intuitive to Brutus’ declaration that he was restoring the Republic by assassinating a tyrant.  In addition, the coin is also stamped with the name of the moneyer who had them made – L. Plaetorius Cestianus – and the inscription EID MAR (for Eidibus Martiis, or Ides of March) flanks a freedman’s cap.  The symbolism is clear:  Brutus wanted his soldiers to know that the Ides of March brought about the freedom of the Republic from tyranny, and that he was the instrument of that liberation.

However, Brutus was unsuccessful in his bid to make his name as a saviour.  He and his fellow conspirators were tracked across the known world by Marc Antony and Octavian Caesar and defeated at Philippi only a few years after the assassination.  Brutus committed suicide rather than be captured by Antony.

http://www.mondointasca.org/notizie-flash.php?ida=17364&sez=15

In New York Times columnist Steve Coates’ response to various outraged comments about the death of King Priam of Troy, the author replies that it is true that the death of Priam is not chronicled in Homer’s epic, The Iliad (which is obvious, when one is aware of the fact that the Iliad concludes with the death of Achilles, not with the end of the war), but rather in the Roman epic, The Aeneid, by Publius Vergilius Maro or Virgil, if you will.  It is the concluding comments in this article that took me aback more profoundly than any argument over the source of the death of King Priam:

No matter how skillful these translations, Virgil’s Latin suffers far more in translation than does Homeric Greek. It’s worth learning Latin just to read the “Aeneid.”

Clearly there are some people who enjoyed translating the mightily convoluted 4th Eclogue more than my high school latin class who condemned the technicolour sheep for their very presence in our busy lives.

Not to condemn the value of learning Latin, of course.  Yes, to read the Aeneid, you must have some sincere appreciation for the beauty of the language Virgil uses throughout his poetic epic.  But you need that same appreciation to recognize Caesar’s wit and political prowess, to sympathize with Catullus’ sparrow, and to understand what a conceited wretch Cicero really was.  To know the people, you must know the language so that you can know how they thought about the world they lived in.  It’s as simple as that.