[tied] Re: alb. gji

From: Daniel J. Milton
Message: 19482
Date: 2003-03-02

Alex, let's analyze your statement: "Vergilius said Latins are
Thracians, it will be shown he said the truth".
What did Vergil write, or what can we infer he believed, even if he
didn't explicitly write it?
Unlike the first six, the last six books of the Aeneid were not
drilled into my brain by thirty lines a day translation, so I could
well be missing some points. Anyway, here I go.
Vergil certainly wrote that some ancestors of the Romans, the ones
that really count, were Trojans. But you speak of Latins. According
to Dionysius of Halicarnassus (and I assume that this was the sort of
thing Vergil would know), Aborigines came down from the Appenines and
settled down as Latini under King Latinus (I'm getting this from the
Enc. Brit. 11th ed.) and were there to welcome Aeneas when he landed.
The name of the Aborigines suggested that they didn't come from
anywhere else, although Cato regarded them as Hellenic immigrants.
According to Hesiod, Latinos was the son of Odysseus and Circe, if you
can make anything out of that. Certainly not Thracians.
However, you probably meant "Romans" when you wrote "Latins", so
let's go on. Unless I've really missed something, Vergil never wrote
that the Trojans were Thracians. My guess is that if you had suggested
it to him, his first response would have been the distinction so
meaningful to Herodotus (as well as G. Bush, S. Hussain and too many
others) "No, Thracians are Europeans, Trojans were Asiatics." I'm not
aware of any foundations myths that put either people elsewhere than
in their historic homes. If you asked whether they were
linguistically and culturally related (however that might be expressed
in Latin), the answer would probably have been "No, the Thracians are
barbarians; the Trojans spoke Greek (at least there never seemed to be
a communication problen between the sides in the Iliad)."
Was there indeed a linguistic or cultural similarity between the
Thracians and the people of Troy VI(+-), who may have fought a war
with the Greeks? It seems not unlikely. I'll listen to Alex's (or
anybody else's) arguments, but don't state it on Vergil's authority!
Dan