“I could have been a Judge, but I never had the Latin for the judgin” – Peter Cook.
Well I did have a bit of Latin and I was thinking the other day of The Aeneid which I did for O-Level. It was the only thing that made it bearable; that and our Latin teacher shocking us all to bits by using the F-word to describe quite what it was that Dido and Aeneas were getting up to in that cave.
I was looking it up on Wikipedia just now and the entry on Dido – Queen of Carthage (as opposed to Dido – The Singer, presumably) has this amusing paragraph: (bear in mind that prior to this Aeneas has slung his hook with his fleet and Dido has impaled herself on his sword and indulged in a bit of self-immolation on the marital bed…)
During his journey in the underworld Aeneas meets Dido and tries to excuse himself, but Dido does not deign to look at him. Instead she turns away from Aeneas to a grove where her former husband Sychaeus waits. T. S. Eliot once called this “the most telling snub” in Western literature.