Words for Board: Ovid, Art of Love, Virgil, Aeneid

This is a lecture of attitudes. Nations are made up of people. People have 2 basic attitudes: optimistic or pessimistic. Everybody has some of both but only one basic outlook. It is better to be an optimist cuz they win and pessimists lose. The reason is cuz optimists tend to work harder so they get farther ahead and pessimists don't work. An optimist thinks things are going to get better so he wants to be ready to take advantage of the things coming up. So he will work to be ready and if he does get a break, he's ready and things go smoother which may pave the way for more breaks. Pessimists think things are going to get worse and so why hustle when there aren't any chances anyway. If you think you can't do something, you'll quit trying and therefore you can't do it. Both attitudes are like spirals -- the more you do the more breaks, etc. or the less you do the less you get–whichever you happen to be.

Countries have basic attitudes too since they're made up of the people with the attitudes. Optimistic countries will solve problems cuz they're usually looking for a solution. Greeks were basically pessimists in the first century AD cuz they saw no future. They'd lost the world to the Romans and knew they'd never rise again. They were the kind of people who were upset if they weren't on top. Roman senators (upper class people) were depressed cuz they weren't in control of things anymore. They couldn't dominate so they gave up.

There was a poet Ovid who wrote for the upper class. He wrote The Art of Love. We don't understand how the title word love is used cuz we use it so broadly today. We should retitle the book the Art of Seduction. He told how to hustle a date, upgrade the service of your prostitutes, etc. You might think it's great but actually it's kind of depressing. It shows depression cuz all the upper class had to do with their time was figure out better ways to seduce each other. They spent their total life on ideas of sex etc. (The next part of this lecture is going to go bad if you're one of those party hardy type people! But I agree with it so you have to hear it.) This is a direct quote from Stockmyer -- just believe it. (You may have to take it on faith.) "Wild parties are not really fun -- what is fun, is work!" People who party all the time are depressed and dull. They have to fill their lives with noise and activity cuz there's nothing else. There was a party element in Rome lead by the upper class Romans. Western culture (Europe and us) teach we need a productive life to feel like human beings. That's why retiring is so hard on Americans. They need significant work (not being a Dairy Queen slave for the rest of your life) with meaning and stuff like that to make life satisfying. (By the way -- Augustus kicked Ovid out of the country cuz he was depressing.)

Most of Rome and the East was optimistic in the first century (not the upper class Romans or Greeks). There were a lot more optimists than pessimists in the world. The state of Rome subsidized optimistic writers. Virgil was one of those poets. The government payrolled him to keep the good stuff coming. He wrote at the same time as Ovid but he was government-sponsored. One of the projects the government wanted him to be behind was moving people from the ghetto back to the farms. Virgil wrote nice things about farmers to encourage people moving back, called the "Georgics." He got his government check for sponsoring the back to nature theme. Nobody believed him and his stuff about how nice it is to work outdoors and hear the little cows moo and see the bunnies hop around your crops. But he tried. His big project was the Aeneid. Remember how the ‘Romans were embarrassed to run into the Greeks with the heritage of the Romans only going back to the overthrowing of the Etruscan kings??? Well Virgil faked an entire new national origin for the Romans that went back to the time of the Trojan war between the Greeks and the Trojans. Aeneas was supposedly a Trojan type who, when beaten, took his twin sons (Remus and Romulus) and went to Italy and founded Rome. It was all propaganda. One of the parts of the book tells about touring heaven and getting a preview of the future. Shows the Romans fighting for the world and conquering it. It also shows Caesar as a great leader and implies that Augustus is the Messiah. The Romans saw themselves as military and administrators..