Oops …

… Classicist says quote of Virgil's inscribed on 9/11 Memorial is "shockingly inappropriate" � MobyLives. (Hat tip, Dave Lull.)

As the New York Times ‘ David W. Dunlap points out, Virgil’s “you” actually refers to the characters, Nisus and Euryalus, two warrior-lovers who “have just slaughtered the enemy in an orgy of violence, skewering soldiers whom [they] ambushed in their sleep.” And for this massacre, Nisus and Euryalus are killed, their heads impaled on spears. Of the inscription at the 9/11 Memorial Museum, Helen Morales, a classicist at the University of California, Santa Barbara, told the Times, “If we take into account its original context, the quotation is more applicable to the aggressors in the 9/11 tragedy than those honored by the memorial…So my first reaction is that the quotation is shockingly inappropriate for the U.S. victims of the 9/11 attack.”

Yet another reason to get a classical education.