Pasquale Toscano
speaker
115 appearances
1 recordings
1 series
first heard Aug 2026
last heard 3 Aug
Pasquale Toscano’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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recordings per month · last 12 monthsRecordings per month over the last 12 months — 1 in all, peaking in Aug 2026 with 1.
Appearances
Right.
And there's a really good case, and many great scholars, greater than me for sure, have made it that Aeneas does not do that at the end of the Aeneid.
Again, I don't want to spoil the whole thing, but I think Virgil is inviting us to think about this gap and how we articulate our aspirations for ourselves as people and as society, and then how we follow through on that and how it's really hard to follow through on that.
The other thing I would say, and this is sort of in dialogue with Paradise Lost in particular,
is this idea about how attractive demagoguery can be.
Demagogues, authoritarian leaders, don't just gain power through sheer force.
Satan, in Book 9 of Paradise Lost, again, spoiler alert, comes to Eve, and he's preying on very real discontents, right?
I mean, at one point, Eve says, for inferior, who is free?
I mean, she knows.
She is unequal.
In the Garden of Eden, there is a hierarchy, and she's not at the top of that hierarchy, even though she's probably the smartest and most curious person in the garden.
So he's preying on a very real discontent, but then warps that discontent to totally malicious ends.
And you get that at the beginning of the poem, where you see Satan in hell with his devils, and they seem to be having a real discourse and dialogue, but in fact, they're just propping up what he says at the beginning.
Interpret that as you like, but those are two points that I think a lot about
while trying to make sense of, as you said, Emily, the sheer sort of constant of change in this moment.
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