Vixere fortes ante Agamemnona Multi: sed omnes illacrimabiles Urgentur, ignotique longa Nocte, carent quia vate sacro.
(“Many heroes lived before Agamemnon, but they are all unmourned, and consigned to oblivion, because they had not their sacred bard.”)

– Horace

I first read that quote on a webpage of Latin mottos where it was offered as just the first statement- “Vixere fortes ante agamemnona”- to mean that heroism exists even if no one notices it. Ironically, or perhaps appropriately, this is a perfect demonstration of the power of the pen. The quote itself extols the role of writers and poets in giving heroes immortality.

The metacontext of the quote is that when Horace wrote the passage in his Odes, he was simping for the original “sacred bard” Homer, author of the Iliad where Agamemnon’s story is recounted. Some translators have taken a little poetic license on this and interpret the passage (the way I first heard it) as “Brave men lived before Agamemon, but they died forgotten, for there were no poets before Homer.”

The meta-metacontext is that, if you read the Iliad at all, Agamemnon is pretty much an absolute knob, a coward, a monster, and absolutely responsible for all of his own failures including and especially his own death. So millennia of writers and poets have been needed to burnish his story into anything remotely resembling a hero.

That’s what we in the creative business call “serious workshopping.”

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