When I was in eighth grade, my Latin teacher pulled in the TV cart with the VHS and asked us to scan book 1 of Virgil's Aeneid while listening to the main theme from The Last of the Mohicans. There were only three of us in the class, which we had to petition him to teach, given the desertion of our other classmates after the tears and triumphs of De bello Gallico the year before. The movie theme is in triplets, rather than triple meter, but I suppose the heavily accented first beat of each triplet was supposed to get us to attend, at least speculatively, to Virgil's dactylic hexameter. There is, of course, no obvious relation between the classical quantitative meter constitutive of the Aeneid and Hollywood's scoring of settler-colonialist fantasy. The ploy was an obvious and effective plea to keep our attention fixed on the units of...

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