By David W. Dunlap
April 2, 2014
Who are “you”?
When the National September 11 Memorial Museum opens next month at the World Trade Center, visitors will find a stark wall separating them from a repository containing about 8,000 unidentified human remains from the 2001 terrorist attack.
On the wall is a 60-foot-long inscription, in 15-inch letters made from the steel of the twin towers: “No day shall erase you from the memory of time. Virgil.”
It sounds fitting — except in the context of Book 9 of the “Aeneid,” from which it is translated. There, a reader learns who “you” are.
“You” are not nameless. You are Nisus and Euryalus.
“You” do not number in the thousands. You are two.
“You” are not civilians. You are Trojan soldiers.
“You” have not been thrown together by cruel chance. You are a loving pair.
Your deaths are not unprovoked. You have just slaughtered the enemy in an orgy of violence, skewering soldiers whom you ambushed in their sleep. For this, the enemy has killed you and impaled your heads on spears.
https://www.nytimes.com/2014/04/03/nyregion/an-inscription-taken-out-of-poetic-context-and-placed-on-a-9-11-memorial.html