Most Memorable Opening Lines in Ancient Literature

Today, if one looks around on the internet, one can find all kinds of lists that purport to present the most memorable opening lines “of all time,” but, invariably, these opening lines are always from famous works of English literature written within the past two centuries. I have therefore decided to compile my own list of most memorable opening lines—but only for works of ancient literature.

I have chosen which lines to include in this post based on how impactful and memorable they are, not on how famous they are. As a result, many of the works I have included on this list are not well known to the general public. Meanwhile, I have omitted the opening lines of certain works that are extremely famous, but not especially memorable in their own right, such as the opening lines of Plato’s Republic and Julius Caesar’s De Bello Gallico, which are famous because the works they come from are famous, not because they are especially memorable. I have chosen opening lines from works produced in a range of ancient cultures, including ancient Mesopotamia, the Levant, India, Greece, and Rome, and have chosen openings that I find memorable for a variety of different reasons.

Inanna and Ebiḫ

Inanna and Ebiḫ is a narrative poem in the Sumerian language in which Inanna, the goddess of war and sex, utterly destroys the mountain Ebiḫ. It is sometimes attributed to the poet Enḫeduanna, the daughter of the Akkadian king Sargon who served as the priestess of the moon-god Nanna in the Sumerian city-state of Uruk in the twenty-third century BCE. In reality, it is more likely that the poem dates to the Third Dynasty of Ur (lasted c. 2112 – c. 2004 BCE) or the Isin-Larsa Period (lasted c. 2025 – c. 1763 BCE). It was one of the most popular texts used for the training of scribes during the Old Babylonian Period.

The Electronic Text Corpus of Sumerian Literature (ETCSL) translates the opening six lines of the poem as follows:

“Goddess of the fearsome divine powers, clad in terror, riding on the great divine powers, Inana, made complete by the strength of the holy ankar weapon, drenched in blood, rushing around in great battles, with shield resting on the ground (?), covered in storm and flood, great lady Inana, knowing well how to plan conflicts, you destroy mighty lands with arrow and strength and overpower lands.”

The poem immediately overwhelms the reader with a vivid description of Inanna’s terrifying divine majesty and her capacity for violent destruction. The way these opening lines are all one long run-on sentence containing a whole list of attributes contributes to the reader’s sense of being overpowered by Inanna’s glory.

ABOVE: Impression from an ancient Akkadian cylinder seal dating to between c. 2334 and c. 2154 BCE, depicting the goddess Inanna wielding a weapon while resting her foot on the back of a roaring lion, which she holds on a leash

The Book of Hosea

The Book of Hosea is a work of ancient prophetic literature in the Hebrew language that is traditionally said to have been written by Hosea son of Beeri, a prophet of the northern kingdom of Israel who supposedly flourished between c. 760 and c. 720 BCE.

Most critical Biblical scholars agree that the original core of the book consists of prophetic oracles that originated in some fashion in the eighth century BCE, but most also think that the book has undergone significant later additions and edits. Scholars debate how much of the book as it survives actually goes back to the eighth century BCE and how much of it is the product of these later revisions.

Because the book itself is the only surviving evidence for the person Hosea, it is impossible to say whether he was actually a real person who wrote the book or a fictional character that the author (or authors) of the book invented for literary purposes. Today, the Book of Hosea is included in the Hebrew Bible as one of the Twelve Minor Prophets.

The first line of the book as it has been passed down through the manuscript tradition (Hos. 1:1) is a superscription that serves more as a statement of title and authorship than a proper introduction to the work and most scholars agree that it was probably added at some point after the initial composition of the book. The first line of the book proper (Hos. 1:2) reads as follows in Hebrew:

תְּחִלַּ֥ת דִּבֶּר־יְהֹוָ֖ה בְּהוֹשֵׁ֑עַ {פ}
וַיֹּ֨אמֶר יְהֹוָ֜ה אֶל־הוֹשֵׁ֗עַ לֵ֣ךְ קַח־לְךָ֞ אֵ֤שֶׁת זְנוּנִים֙ וְיַלְדֵ֣י זְנוּנִ֔ים כִּֽי־זָנֹ֤ה תִזְנֶה֙ הָאָ֔רֶץ מֵאַחֲרֵ֖י יְהֹוָֽה׃

The New Revised Standard Version Updated Edition (NRSVUE) renders this verse into English as follows (with the divine name restored):

“When Yahweh first spoke through Hosea, Yahweh said to Hosea, ‘Go, take for yourself a wife of prostitution and have children of prostitution, for the land commits great prostitution by forsaking Yahweh.’”

The fact that the book begins with Yahweh, the national god of Israel, ordering Hosea to marry a prostitute and have children with her is shocking and completely subverts any expectation the reader might have had about how a work of prophetic literature should begin.

Hosea then goes on to develop the story of his marriage into an extended allegory for the relationship between Yahweh and the kingdom of Israel, with himself standing for Yahweh and his wife Gomer standing for the kingdom of Israel, which commits “adultery” by worshipping deities other than Yahweh.

ABOVE: Illustration of the prophet Hosea and his wife Gomer from the Bible Historiale (Den Haag, MMW, 10 B 23 426r), dating to 1372 CE

The Iliad

There is simply no way I could have made this list and not included the iconic invocation of the Muse at the beginning of the Iliad, which is an ancient Greek epic poem in dactylic hexameter verse that developed out of oral tradition.

The Iliad most likely reached something resembling the form in which we know it today sometime around the second quarter of the seventh century BCE or thereabouts and may have been first written down sometime around the final quarter of the sixth century BCE. Later, scholars in Alexandria in the third century BCE created the standard text that has been passed down to the present day through the medieval manuscript tradition.

The opening lines of the Iliad are easily the most famous of all the ones quoted here. They are famous in part because the poem itself is so well known and they happen to be at the beginning, but also because they are genuinely one of the most dramatic literary openings of all time:

“μῆνιν ἄειδε θεὰ Πηληϊάδεω Ἀχιλῆος
οὐλομένην, ἣ μυρί᾽ Ἀχαιοῖς ἄλγε᾽ ἔθηκε,
πολλὰς δ᾽ ἰφθίμους ψυχὰς Ἄϊδι προΐαψεν
ἡρώων, αὐτοὺς δὲ ἑλώρια τεῦχε κύνεσσιν
οἰωνοῖσί τε πᾶσι, Διὸς δ᾽ ἐτελείετο βουλή,
ἐξ οὗ δὴ τὰ πρῶτα διαστήτην ἐρίσαντε
Ἀτρεΐδης τε ἄναξ ἀνδρῶν καὶ δῖος Ἀχιλλεύς.”

This means, in my own translation:

“Sing, goddess, the wrath of the son of Peleus Achilleus,
ruinous, which set myriad sufferings for the Achaians [i.e., the Greeks],
and sent many brave souls of heroes to Hades [i.e., the underworld]
and made them carrion for dogs
and for all birds, and the will of Zeus was being fulfilled,
from when exactly the two first parted and quarreled:
the son of Atreus, king of men, and godlike Achilleus.”

The very first word of the poem in the original Greek is μῆνις (mênis), which means “wrath.” The fact that the epic begins with such a forceful, exciting word immediately captures the audience’s attention. The proem then holds onto the audience’s attention by describing the devastation that Achilleus’s anger caused using the vivid image of the souls of dead warriors going down to the underworld while wild dogs and scavenger birds feast on their fallen corpses.

Through this description, the poem gives the audience a preview of the excitement and violence that it will narrate. This encourages the listener or reader to stick around so that they won’t miss out on what is to come. Only after the narrator has given his audience this preview of the coming violence does he go back in narrative time to address the cause of Achilleus’s anger.

As I discuss in greater detail in this post I wrote in November 2022, other ancient literary sources indicate that the “Διὸς . . . βουλή” (“will of Zeus”) that the poet references in line 5 is a specific plan Zeus that developed to cause devastating wars on the earth, either in order to annihilate demigods from the earth completely or to kill as many humans in general as possible to alleviate the burden they were weighing on Gaia, the earth.

For ancient audience members who were familiar with this tradition, this mention of Zeus’s plan would have helped them to situate the story that the poet is about to tell within the context of stories that they already knew.

ABOVE: Detail from Wikimedia Commons showing an ancient Greek polychrome vase painting depicting Achilleus fighting the Aithiopian king Memnon, dating to around 300 BCE or thereabouts, now held in the Rijksmuseum voor Oudheden in Leiden, the Netherlands

The Bṛhadāraṇyaka Upaniṣad

Sanskrit is an ancient language that was spoken in India. The oldest surviving works of Sanskrit literature are the Saṃhitās of the four Vedas, which consist of hymns, prayers, and mantras. Younger than the Saṃhitās are the Upaniṣads, which are ancient treatises that discuss the interpretation of the Saṃhitās and Vedic rituals. They discuss philosophical and religious concepts that remain important in South Asian religions today. In contemporary Hinduism, the Upaniṣads are considered sacred scriptures.

Scholars generally consider the Bṛhadāraṇyaka Upaniṣad to be the oldest of all the Upaniṣads overall, followed closely by the Chāndogya Upaniṣad. It was most likely developed over the seventh and sixth centuries BCE as various treatises that were eventually edited together as a collection.

One of the most important religious rituals in Vedic society in this period was the aśvamedha, which was the sacrifice of a horse. The Bṛhadāraṇyaka Upaniṣad begins with a passage explaining the sacrificial horse as the embodiment of the whole cosmos. It reads as follows, as translated by Patrick Olivelle for Oxford World’s Classics:

“The head of the sacrificial horse, clearly, is the dawn—its sight is the sun; its breath is the wind; and its gaping mouth is the fire common to all men. The body (ātman) of the sacrificial horse is the year—its back is the sky; its abdomen is the intermediate region; its underbelly is the earth; its flanks are the quarters; its ribs are the intermediate quarters; its limbs are the seasons; its joints are the months and fortnights; its feet are the days and nights; its bones are the stars; its flesh is the clouds; its stomach contents are the sand; its intestines are the rivers; its liver and lungs are the hills; its body hairs are the plants and trees; its forequarter is the rising sun; and its hindquarter is the setting sun. When it yawns, lightning flashes; when it shakes itself, it thunders; and when it urinates, it rains. Its neighing is speech itself.”

This explanation of the horse sacrifice probably would not have seemed like an especially strange beginning for readers in ancient India, but it generally strikes modern readers who are not familiar with the aśvamedha ritual and its importance as quite bizarre and baffling. It is this bizarre quality that makes this opening passage so memorable.

ABOVE: Nineteenth-century Indian painted illustration depicting the god Kṛṣṇa (shown in blue) advising an army how to perform the aśvamedha or horse sacrifice

Prometheus Bound

Prometheus Bound is a Greek tragedy that was originally performed in Athens sometime between c. 479 and c. 424 BCE. It is traditionally attributed to the Athenian tragic playwright Aischylos (lived c. 525 – c. 455 BCE), but modern scholars are split over whether he is really the author; some scholars maintain that he did write it, while others argue that the attribution of the play to him is incorrect. I personally lean towards the view that Aischylos did write it, but this is just my opinion based on my reading of the play and a cursory perusal of the scholarship; I haven’t thoroughly researched the subject.

Regardless of who wrote it, Prometheus Bound has a pretty awesome opening scene. For background, the play is set in the distant primordial past, very early in the reign of Zeus over the cosmos. Before the play begins, Zeus issued a decree forbidding any of the gods from giving fire to humans. Nonetheless, the Titan Prometheus, whose name means “forethought” and whom the Greeks regarded as the consistent supporter and champion of humans among the gods, secretly stole fire and gave it to humans anyway, even though he knew full well that Zeus would inevitably find out and punish him for doing so.

In the opening scene of the play, acting on Zeus’s orders, Kratos (the divine personification of power, whom I discuss in greater detail in this post I made in March 2020) and his sister Bia (the divine personification of violent force) have brought Prometheus to the edge of the earth to punish him for having given humans the gift of fire. In his opening speech, Kratos orders Hephaistos, the god of blacksmiths, to chain Prometheus to a rocky crag, proclaiming:

“Χθονὸς μὲν ἐς τηλουρὸν ἥκομεν πέδον,
Σκύθην ἐς οἷμον, ἄβατον εἰς ἐρημίαν.
Ἥφαιστε, σοὶ δὲ χρὴ μέλειν ἐπιστολὰς
ἅς σοι πατὴρ ἐφεῖτο, τόνδε πρὸς πέτραις
ὑψηλοκρήμνοις τὸν λεωργὸν ὀχμάσαι
ἀδαμαντίνων δεσμῶν ἐν ἀρρήκτοις πέδαις.
τὸ σὸν γὰρ ἄνθος, παντέχνου πυρὸς σέλας,
θνητοῖσι κλέψας ὤπασεν. τοιᾶσδέ τοι
ἁμαρτίας σφε δεῖ θεοῖς δοῦναι δίκην,
ὡς ἂν διδαχθῇ τὴν Διὸς τυραννίδα
στέργειν, φιλανθρώπου δὲ παύεσθαι τρόπου.”

This means, in my own translation:

“We have come to the most distant ground of the earth,
to the Skythian path, to an untrodden wilderness.
Hephaistos! You must take care of the orders
which your father spoke: to bind the villain [i.e., Prometheus]
to these lofty-cliffed rocks
in unbreakable fetters of adamantine chains,
since he stole your flower of bright flame, which aids all arts,
and gave it to mortals. For this
mistake, he must suffer punishment for the gods,
so that he will learn to love the tyranny of Zeus,
and cease the habit of loving humans!”

The remote temporal and spatial setting of the play in the primordial past and at the end of the earth, which is unparalleled in any other surviving Greek tragedy, combined with the drama of Kratos and Bia forcing Hephaistos to chain Prometheus to the cliff, make this opening scene especially memorable.

The opening scene also introduces major questions and themes that are central to the rest of the play and that remain profoundly resonant even today. Right from the beginning, the play depicts Kratos, the agent of Zeus, as a brute who advocates a philosophy of “might makes right” and Zeus himself as an all-powerful authoritarian ruler who is at the very least not interested in promoting the wellbeing of humans and who metes out brutal punishments against anyone who defies his commands. The play immediately leads the audience to wonder how one should act if the supreme ruler of the cosmos is unjust and not friendly to humans.

Prometheus’s punishment also raises the fundamental question of whether one should comply with unjust orders or resist them, even when one knows that doing so will certainly come at enormous personal cost. The rest of the play makes it very clear that, when Prometheus stole fire and give it to humans, he did not do so believing that he would escape punishment. On the contrary, the play depicts Prometheus as having prophetic knowledge of future events and as having still chosen to defy Zeus’s order not to give fire to humans, even though he knew that Zeus would find out and condemn him to millennia of torment.

Kratos and Prometheus therefore differ not in terms of what they knew or expected to happen, but rather in their perspective. The play leads the audience to consider whose perspective holds greater merit.

ABOVE: Illustration by the British Neoclassical artist John Flaxman (lived 1755 – 1826), first published in 1795, depicting Kratos and Bia holding Prometheus down as Hephaistos chains him to the mountainside. For some reason, in this illustration, Bia is portrayed as male.

Protagoras of Abdera’s On the Deities

Protagoras of Abdera (lived c. 490 – c. 420 BCE) was an ancient Greek sophist whom I have written about several times before on this blog, including in this post from February 2022. He wrote a notable treatise in prose titled On the Deities. Sadly, this treatise has not survived, but its opening line was so memorable that the much later Greek biographer Diogenes Laërtios (who flourished around the third century CE) preserves it through quotation in his Lives and Opinions of Eminent Philosophers 9.8.51:

“περὶ μὲν θεῶν οὐκ ἔχω εἰδέναι, οὔθ’ ὡς εἰσὶν οὔθ’ ὡς οὐκ εἰσὶν οὔθ’ ὁποῖοί τινες ἰδέαν· πολλὰ γὰρ τὰ κωλύοντά με εἰδέναι, ἥ τε ἀδηλότης καὶ βραχὺς ὢν ὁ βίος τοῦ ἀνθρώπου.”

This means, in my own translation:

“Concerning deities, I cannot know whether they exist or not, nor can I know of what sort they may be; for many things prevent me from knowing, namely the obscurity of the subject and the brief life of a human being.”

Ancient Greeks who believed in and worshipped the traditional deities were shocked by Protagoras’s forthright declaration of agnosticism. Diogenes Laërtios alleges in his Lives and Opinions of Eminent Philosophers 9.8.52 that the Athenians in particular were so horrified by Protagoras’s agnosticism that they banished him from their city and rounded up all the copies of his works they could find so they could burn them in the agora.

Historically speaking, these events probably never really happened; there are good reasons to believe that it is a later legend that someone simply made up. Nonetheless, the fact that writers in antiquity even told such a story still reflects how radical and dangerous some perceived Protagoras’s ideas to be.

If Diogenes Laërtios accurately records the treatise’s opening words, then Protagoras certainly didn’t bury the lede; he put his most radical ideas right in his opening paragraph. That is a kind of moxie that I have no choice but to respect.

ABOVE: Democritus and Protagoras, painted between 1663 and 1664 by the Italian Baroque painter Salvator Rosa

Euripides’s Medeia

Euripides (lived c. 480 – c. 406 BCE) was an ancient Athenian tragic playwright. Nineteen plays attributed to him have survived to the present day more-or-less complete. Most scholars agree that Euripides really wrote eighteen of these plays, but one of them, Rhesos, is actually the work of a different, less talented playwright.

One of Euripides’s best-known and most regularly performed plays today is Medeia, which was first performed at the City Dionysia in Athens in 431 BCE. The protagonist of the play is Medeia, the daughter of King Aiëtes of Kolchis who, before the play begins, fell in love with Iason, the rightful heir to the throne of the Greek city of Iolkos, who had come to Kolchis in search of the Golden Fleece, since his uncle Pelias, who had usurped the throne, had promised that he would step down and allow Iason to be king if he brought him the Golden Fleece.

Medeia betrayed her family to help Iason retrieve the fleece, murdered her own brother to help him escape, and returned with him to Iolkos. Nonetheless, upon returning, Iason’s uncle Pelias broke his promise to Iason and refused to give up the throne. Medeia tricked Pelias’s daughters into murdering him, but she and Iason were driven out for the murder, forcing them to flee to Corinth. At some point in this, Medeia gave birth to two sons by Iason.

When the play begins, despite everything Medeia has done for him, Iason has broken his own promise to remain faithful to her, has abandoned her, and is planning to marry the daughter of Kreon, the king of Corinth, in order to advance his own social position.

The play begins with the enslaved woman who nurses Medeia and Iason’s children delivering what is perhaps the most memorable opening monologue of any surviving Greek tragedy, in which she sorrowfully recounts the events that have led to the present situation in the form of an extended counterfactual wish, saying:

“Εἴθ᾽ ὤφελ᾽ Ἀργοῦς μὴ διαπτάσθαι σκάφος
Κόλχων ἐς αἶαν κυανέας Συμπληγάδας,
μηδ᾽ ἐν νάπαισι Πηλίου πεσεῖν ποτε
τμηθεῖσα πεύκη, μηδ᾽ ἐρετμῶσαι χέρας
ἀνδρῶν ἀριστέων οἳ τὸ πάγχρυσον δέρος
Πελίᾳ μετῆλθον. οὐ γὰρ ἂν δέσποιν᾽ ἐμὴ
Μήδεια πύργους γῆς ἔπλευσ᾽ Ἰωλκίας
ἔρωτι θυμὸν ἐκπλαγεῖσ᾽ Ἰάσονος:”

This means, in my own translation:

“I wish that the hull of the Argo had never flown
to the land of the Kolchians through the dark Symplegades,
and that the cut pines had never fallen in the glens of Pelion,
and that the hands of the best men,
who sought the all-golden fleece for Pelias,
had never rowed. For then my mistress
Medeia would not have sailed for the towers of the Iolkian land,
struck in her heart with desire for Iason.”

I find Euripides’s decision to explain the background of the play through this counterfactual a really ingenious creative decision.

Everyone in Medeia‘s audience when it was first performed in Athens in 431 BCE would have already been familiar with the story of Iason’s journey to Kolchis to retrieve the Golden Fleece long before they ever walked into the theater. The nurse’s speech therefore serves as exposition for the action of the play by reminding the audience of the mythic events that took place before the play begins and helping them to situate the temporal setting of the play relative to the other stories they already knew.

Euripides, however, doesn’t just rehash stories that his audience already knew from the same perspective they were used to. Most of his original audience members would have been accustomed to thinking about the story of the quest for the Golden Fleece from the male hero Iason’s perspective. Euripides, by contrast, shifts the perspective from Iason to a far less central character: the enslaved nurse of Medeia’s children, who is triply marginalized because she is a woman, because she is enslaved, and because her role is to take care of children.

Through this shift in the perspective, although the events of the story remain the same, Euripides changes their meaning. From Iason’s perspective, the story of his recovery of the Golden Fleece is a glorious one, because he succeeds in his quest and wins glory through it. From the nurse’s perspective, though, the story is a tragic, regrettable one, because it ultimately leads to the miserable situation that Medeia faces at the beginning of the play.

Furthermore, rather than simply having the nurse narrate how these things happened, Euripides has her flatly wish that the events hadn’t happened. This makes the audience wonder why she would wish such a thing and piques their interest for what she will say next.

ABOVE: Jason and Medea, painted by the English Pre-Raphaelite painter John William Waterhouse in 1907

Aristophanes’s Lysistrata

A younger contemporary of Euripides was the Athenian comic playwright Aristophanes (lived c. 446 – c. 386 BCE). One of Aristophanes’s best-known and most widely performed comedies today is Lysistrata, which was originally performed in 411 BCE at a religious festival in Athens in honor of the god Dionysos, who was also known as Bakkhos.

The play begins with the titular protagonist, an Athenian woman named Lysistrata, standing alone on stage complaining about how other women were supposed to show up for a meeting, but none of them have arrived yet. She contrasts the present situation with what it would be like if a festival of Bakkhos or Pan or other gods associated with ecstatic cult practices were happening. She says:

“ἀλλ᾽ εἴ τις ἐς Βακχεῖον αὐτὰς ἐκάλεσεν,
ἢ ‘ς Πανὸς ἢ ‘πὶ Κωλιάδ᾽ ἢ ‘ς Γενετυλλίδος,
οὐδ᾽ ἂν διελθεῖν ἦν ἂν ὑπὸ τῶν τυμπάνων.
νῦν δ᾽ οὐδεμία πάρεστιν ἐνταυθοῖ γυνή:”

This means:

“If someone called these women for a Bakkhic revelry,
or one of Pan or of Kolias or of Genetyllis,
then it would not be possible to pass through the streets under the tympana [i.e., hand drums].
But now no woman at all is present here!”

The context of the original performance of this play adds several layers of dramatic irony. First, as I mentioned before, Lysistrata was originally performed at a religious festival in honor of Dionysos. Although we do not know anything about the specific proceedings of the specific festival for which this play was originally performed, the scenario Lysistrata imagines in the first line of crowds of women bearing hand drums filling the streets in order to worship Bakkhos, Pan, Kolias, or Genetyllis is precisely the sort of scene that audience members could potentially have witnessed on such an occasion.

Additionally, although it is likely that at least some women were present in the audience at the original staging of Lysistrata in 411 BCE, all actors on stage in Greek drama were always men; female characters were always portrayed by male actors in drag. Thus, when Lysistrata says “no woman at all is present here,” the original audience would have recognized that there were quite literally no actual women at all on stage, since even Lysistrata herself was really a man in drag.

Thus, Lysistrata ironically contrasts the reality that the people in the audience are experiencing with the imagined reality that is happening on stage.

ABOVE: Illustration made by the English artist Aubrey Beardsley in 1896 for Aristophanes’s comedy Lysistrata showing one of the women of the play dressed up in her most seductive attire

Ecclesiastes

Qōheleṯ, which is best known to English speakers by the Greek title Ecclesiastes, is a work of Jewish wisdom literature in the Hebrew language that was most likely composed sometime between c. 450 and c. 180 BCE. It is an immensely philosophically and literarily rich text that deals with themes of existentialism and the question of how to live a meaningful and fulfilling life. In striking contrast to most of the other texts included in the Hebrew Bible, it seems relatively unconcerned with God and advocates a philosophy of enjoying life in the present.

Like the Book of Hosea, Ecclesiastes begins with a superscription (Eccles. 1:1), which functions more as a title and introduction of the main speaker than as part of the work itself. This superscription describes the speaker of the book as Qōheleṯ, which means “preacher,” and as a son of David who was king in Jerusalem. Although the book does not expressly say that Qōheleṯ is King Solomon, readers have long understood this identification to be implied.

In reality, of course, Solomon certainly did not write Ecclesiastes; Solomon’s own historical existence is very much uncertain and, even if he was a real person, all evidence indicates that Ecclesiastes dates to a period many centuries after his reign.

In any case, the first line of the text proper (Eccles. 1:2) dives straight away and without hesitation into thorny existential problems. The verse reads as follows in Hebrew:

הֲבֵ֤ל הֲבָלִים֙ אָמַ֣ר קֹהֶ֔לֶת הֲבֵ֥ל הֲבָלִ֖ים הַכֹּ֥ל הָֽבֶל׃
מַה־יִּתְר֖וֹן לָֽאָדָ֑ם בְּכׇ֨ל־עֲמָל֔וֹ שֶֽׁיַּעֲמֹ֖ל תַּ֥חַת הַשָּֽׁמֶשׁ׃
דּ֤וֹר הֹלֵךְ֙ וְד֣וֹר בָּ֔א וְהָאָ֖רֶץ לְעוֹלָ֥ם עֹמָֽדֶת׃

The New Revised Standard Version Updated Edition (NRSVUE) translates these verses as follows:

“Vanity of vanities, says the Teacher,
    vanity of vanities! All is vanity.
What do people gain from all the toil
    at which they toil under the sun?
A generation goes, and a generation comes,
    but the earth remains forever.”

Thus, like Protagoras, the author of Ecclesiastes puts his most radical ideas up front; he begins the work by flatly declaring that all existence is futile and pointless. This beginning shocks the reader and immediately grabs one’s attention. One feels that one must keep reading in order to see whether the narrator will qualify his assertions and to find out how (if at all) he will justify the continuation of existence if everything is pointless.

ABOVE: Illustration by Isaak Asknaziy for the Brockhaus and Efron Jewish Encyclopedia (published in three volumes 1906 – 1913) depicting Qōheleṯ sitting discontented and depressed on his throne, surrounded by all his fabulous wealth and finery

Vergil’s Aeneid

Publius Vergilius Maro (lived 70 – 19 BCE), who is commonly known today in English as “Vergil,” was a Roman poet who is best known today as the author of the Aeneid, an epic poem in the Latin language spanning twelve books that tells the story of the Trojan prince Aeneas, who flees from the city of Troy as the Greeks sack it and eventually journeys to Italy, where he becomes the ancestor of Rome’s legendary founders, Romulus and Remus.

The opening lines of Vergil’ Aeneid pay a memorable homage to the opening lines of the Iliad and the Odyssey. As readers may recall, the Iliad begins “μῆνιν ἄειδε θεὰ. . .” (“Sing, goddess, the wrath. . .”) and the Odyssey begins “ἄνδρα μοι ἔννεπε, μοῦσα. . .” (“Tell me, Muse, about the man. . .”). The Aeneid artfully splices these two openings together, beginning:

“Arma virumque cano, Troiae qui primus ab oris
Italiam, fato profugus, Laviniaque venit
litora, multum ille et terris iactatus et alto
vi superum saevae memorem Iunonis ob iram;”

This means:

“I sing of arms and the man, who first from the bounds of Troy,
an exile by fate, came to Italy and Lavinian shores,
that man much hurled on both land and sea
by the force of the ones above because of savage Iuno’s remembering anger.”

While the opening invocations of the Iliad and the Odyssey each name a single object of song, the Aeneid names two: arms (which call to mind the weapons which are so central to the Iliad) and “the man” (which recalls the Odyssey‘s opening invocation). Later in the opening lines, Vergil manages to incorporate the “anger” that the Iliad invokes in its first line as well: this time not the anger of Achilleus, but instead the anger of the goddess Iuno, whom the Romans identified with the Greek goddess Hera.

This opening invocation of both Iliadic and Odyssean themes foreshadows the structural outline of the rest of the Aeneid. Modern scholars generally recognize that the Aeneid is divided into two halves. The first six books describe Aeneas’s journey from Troy to Italy and the adventures he encounters along the way; this half most closely echoes the Odyssey. Meanwhile, the final six books of the epic describe the wars that Aeneas faces after he arrives in Italy; this half of the book most closely echoes the Iliad. Thus, Vergil tries to position himself as an equal, if not superior, poet to Homer by combining the themes of both Homeric epics into a single poem.

What makes the opening lines of the Aeneid even more memorable is that they possibly contain a hidden acrostic signature. In 2012, the Italian scholar Cristiano Castelletti published a paper (“Following Aratus’ Plow”) in which he points out that, if one takes the first letter and last letter of each of the first four lines in boustrophedon order (i.e., the first letter and then the last of the first line, the last letter of the second line and then the first, and so on) they spell out a Latin acrostic: a stilo M. V. (“from the stylus of M. V.”) He holds that the “M. V.” stands for “Maro Vergilius.” Readers may decide for themselves whether they find this compelling.

ABOVE: Illustration from folio 14 recto of the Vergilius Romanus, an illustrated parchment codex manuscript containing the works of the Roman poet Vergil dating to the fifth century CE, depicting how the illustrator imagined Vergil himself might have looked (No one knows what he really looked like.)

Works cited

• Castelletti, Cristiano. “Following Aratus’ Plow: Vergil’s Signature in the ‘Aeneid.’” Museum Helveticum 69, no. 1 (2012): 83–95. http://www.jstor.org/stable/44081062.