09-22-2011, 08:35 AM
It is a little mysterious that a person would deliberately indulge in whole-sale plagiarism on here. Then again, people are a little mysterious. In practical terms, I should have thought the offence would be in proportion to the length of the piece; six words would be a big chunk of a haiku, but lost in an epic.
On the subject of epics, Virgil would have to be banned, I am afraid. Wanting to create a great national poem for Rome, he took Homer as his model. Homer uses 12 books, Virgil divide his 'Aeneid' into 12 books. Homer uses hexameter, so does Virgil. He has a good bit of swishing around the Med, like Ulysses. He has Aeneas take revenge on account of his slain friend, just as Homer has Achilles stop sulking, and bump off Hector to avenge his friend Patroclus. And he uses lines from earlier Roman poets, like Ennius, sometimes altering them a bit, sometimes not. Perhaps the Greco-Roman world was deficient in the law of Intellectual Property, but I think it would be as well to make it plain, that should Virgil's ghost re-appear, he would not be welcome here. He may have fooled the Italians, but here--- out he will go, kit and caboodle --esp the caboodle!
On the subject of epics, Virgil would have to be banned, I am afraid. Wanting to create a great national poem for Rome, he took Homer as his model. Homer uses 12 books, Virgil divide his 'Aeneid' into 12 books. Homer uses hexameter, so does Virgil. He has a good bit of swishing around the Med, like Ulysses. He has Aeneas take revenge on account of his slain friend, just as Homer has Achilles stop sulking, and bump off Hector to avenge his friend Patroclus. And he uses lines from earlier Roman poets, like Ennius, sometimes altering them a bit, sometimes not. Perhaps the Greco-Roman world was deficient in the law of Intellectual Property, but I think it would be as well to make it plain, that should Virgil's ghost re-appear, he would not be welcome here. He may have fooled the Italians, but here--- out he will go, kit and caboodle --esp the caboodle!