Someone shared this on Bluesky:
Apparently this is what I miss out on by not following Oolong on Twatter, i.e. this sort of first-class mind speculating on history as if he were the first person to ever have this idea and THE FUCKING ROMANS THEMSELVES hadn’t thought of it MILLENNIA ago. Like… the Aeneid exists. It has done since before the putative birth of Christ. The Trojans are there in the extant parts of Dionysius and Livy, which are of the same period.
And the Romans got Aeneas from the Greeks, much like they got almost everything else. I don’t know exactly when the story of him founding the Trojan colony in Italy first originated, but we do find this in the Iliad at one point (Emily Wilson translation):
Aeneas has been fated to survive,
so that the family of Dardanus,
whom Zeus, the son of Cronus, loved the most
of all the sons he had by mortal women,
will not die out, forgotten, with no seed.
But Zeus has come to hate the line of Priam.
Therefore Aeneas and his children’s children
who will be born in future generations
will rule the Trojans.
That’s Poseidon speaking in book 20. Aeneas isn’t a big character in the Iliad, but the idea that he was being spared by the gods for something big was present in this text, whose precise date and origin are still quibbled over (and have been for millennia as well) but it’s generally considered that it was committed to writing some time in the eighth century BC. So the idea that Aeneas was fated to survive the war and flourish as the Trojan ruler (and it doesn’t say he would necessarily rule Troy as such, just the Trojans) goes back a very long way.
And here’s this stupid cunt going on like he’s the first person in history to ever think this. As if he’s ever given the Romans any thought in the first place. Next thing he’ll be noticing that English contains a lot of words from other languages…
