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The Piety of a Pagan

“I am Aeneas, duty-bound, and known Above high air of heaven by my fame, Carrying with me in my ships our gods Of hearth and home, saved from the enemy.” Virgil, The…
John CuddebackJanuary 22, 2014

“I am Aeneas, duty-bound, and known
Above high air of heaven by my fame,
Carrying with me in my ships our gods
Of hearth and home, saved from the enemy.”
Virgil, The Aeneid, I

Pious Aeneas. The phrase appears again and again in The Aeneid. Virgil is intent on sketching in his epic hero the beautiful features of a pious man.

Robert Fitzgerald often translates the sonorous Latin ‘pius Aeneas’ as ‘Aeneas, duty-bound.’ The word duty conveys an essential aspect of piety: that something is owed or due to someone. Someone divine. …
The rest of this Wednesday Quote and reflection is at Bacon from Acorns.

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A stack of three Local Culture journals and the book 'Localism in the Mass Age'

John Cuddeback

John A. Cuddeback is a professor and chairman of the Philosophy Department at Christendom College in Front Royal, Virginia, where he has taught since 1995. He received a Ph.D. in Philosophy from The Catholic University of America under the direction of F. Russell Hittinger. He has lectured on various topics including virtue, culture, natural law, friendship, and household. His book Friendship: The Art of Happiness was republished in 2010 as True Friendship: Where Virtue Becomes Happiness. His writings have appeared in Nova et Vetera, The Thomist, and The Review of Metaphysics, as well as in several volumes published by the American Maritain Association. Though raised in what he calls an ‘archetypical suburb,’ Columbia, Maryland, he and his wife Sofia consider themselves blessed to be raising their six children in the shadow of the Blue Ridge on the banks of the Shenandoah. At the material center of their homesteading projects are heritage breed pigs, which like the pigs of Eumaeus are fattened on acorns, yielding a bacon that too few people ever enjoy. His website dedicated to the philosophy of family and household is baconfromacorns.com.

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