So when did Virgil say No day shall erase you from the memory of time?

And why?

He didn’t actually say it in a speech, like a Caesar or a Cicero.

He wrote it down in a poem, his great epic poem: the Aeneid.

And yet in a way he did say it.

Here are the two verses from which the 9/11 quote was pulled:

Fortunati ambo! writes Virgil, si quid mea carmina possunt, nulla dies umquam memori vos eximet aevo… Literally: ‘Lucky pair! If my verses have any power, no day ever shall remove you (plural) from the memory of time.’ Aeneid IX.446-7

ese words are not put into the mouth of a character in the poem, they are the words of the poet himself. This is one of the few places where Virgil steps out of the story, as it were, to utter this prayer: if my poem lasts, so will the memory of what you did.

So who are the lucky pair? And what did they do?

The short answer is that they are two teenage refugees from a war torn city who die in a failed raid against the inhabitants of the land they hope to settle.

For the longer answer, we have to go back to the sack of Troy.

Remember the story of the Trojan Horse?

How it wasn’t really a Trojan Horse but a Greek Horse, full of soldiers?

How they sneakily smuggled themselves into the city they had been besieging for ten years?

How the Greeks dropped out of the giant horse’s wooden belly in the middle of the night and set about burning Troy and killing everyone in it?

https://the-history-girls.blogspot.com/2018/09/virgil-and-911-memorial.html