If you dream in Latin, it means (a) you have memorized too much Virgil, (b) you fell asleep over Robert Harris’s Imperium, the first novel in a trilogy about Cicero, or (c) you are almost ill over the violence in an obscure epic poem by Valerius Flaccus,

I was lucky to find a Latin copy of Valerius Flaccus’s Argonautica. Nobody reads V.F., as the editor of the Latin text endearingly calls him. Nobody reads V.F., because nobody has heard of him. There are no Penguin or Oxford translations of Argonautica, his epic poem. No one knows anything about him, except that he lived during the first century A.D. It is thought that he died ca. 90 A.D., due to a casual reference by Quintilian. That’s all anyone knows.

But who needs the biography? We have the poem, most of it anyway. And the editor of my Latin text provides a brilliant commentary on Flavian epic, possible emendations to the corrupt text, and divergent scholarly interpretations. I have been enjoying V.F.’s often elegant Latin.

But tonight I am sweating over V.F.’s nightmarish sequence about friendly fire. In the dark, King Cyzicus and his men mistake their friends, Jason and the Argonauts, for enemies. A bloody battle is fought. Many die. And then they realize they have killed their friends.

How will they survive this knowledge?

I can’t get this out of my head.

Should I continue this horror/epic?

Yes, I am almost finished, but I long to read something less gruesome.

Even Virgil’s description of Aeneas’s war in Italy is less violent.

Or do I feel this because we live in challenging times?