As we remember 9/11 tomorrow I offer this reflection from The Aeneid:

We first meet Aeneas in a shipwreck, when he is very much the personal man, wishing himself dead.

O terque quaterque beati,
quis ante ora patrum Troiae sub moenibus altis 
contigit oppetere!“

“O three and four times blessed, those who happened to meet death beore the altars of their fathers under the high walls of Troy!”

Everyone is fessus–tired.   The Trojans are tired.  The ships are described as tired.

But when Aeneas  and only seven of his 20 ships reach the shores of Libya, he must be strong and says (Fagles translation)”  “My comrades, hardly strangers to pain before now, we have all weathered worse.”

And he delivers one of the most famous lines of The Aeneid:

forsan et haec olim meminisse iuvabit. 

“Perhaps one day it will be a joy even to remember these things.”

He has lost his wife, friends, and many relatives in the war.  Does he believe what he says?  He knows how to say it.

And doesn’t this remind us all of sadness and disasters we have overcome?