Too well aware I am that Vergil died
with his Aeneid quite unfinished and---
so would Octavian have us believe---
unready for its publication; but
Octavian commanded Vergil's two
executors to publish with all speed
the poem just as it was. And long have I,
reading it all the many times I have,
believed that some parts of it were not quite
exactly as Octavian had hoped.
But having boasted of the poem's greatness,
and then, before Vergil's corpse had grown cold,
Octavian demanded publication
without corrective gloss or emendation.
And Vergil's vision of what Rome must be
is not the City of reality,
or even of our recent history;
no, not the Rome Octavian bequeathed
to his heirs, and to theirs, and on and on.
I cannot finish my Achilleid;
I do not have sufficient time or strength
to write the myth as it should have been told,
not as Homer distorted it for his
sad tale of Troy. Chiron the Centaur taught
Achilles and Patroclus about love,
and not about warfare. Chiron observed
those two beautiful adolescents' need
to be together---as pupils of his
wisdom, and as boyfriends become lovers
in intimacy; whereby pleasures that
their bodies could provide---pleasures exchanged,
explored, and (most important of all) shared)---
would bring their souls into convergence and
forever couple them together. This,
alas, is not for me to write; and not
the kind of epic poem His Egoship,
Domitian wants. Let silence where my poem
ceases become---with subtle eloquence
unspoken (and closed to the ignorant,
to prudes and haters, and repressors)---a
challenge to some poet in the time
of Love's own choosing to, at last, declare
Patroclus and Achilles' truth----the full
embrace of their natures by which
they loved each other in monogamy,
as Chiron taught them; nor to be slaughtered
before the walls of Troy in some battle.
But, rather, to revere Troy as the place
from which Eros, in love with Ganymede,
conveyed him to Olympus' towering height.
Chiron would have taught them that truth as well;
and of Hylas and Herakles; and of
Orpheus and Kalain: all of them
who understood the sweetness of such Love.
Starward