Escaping the destruction of a city is no easy task. Even less so if you have to worry about your child and carry your elderly father on your shoulders, like Aeneas.
Diodorus Siculus tells the following story:
While everyone else was taking gold or silver or something else of value, Aeneas implored the Greeks for the life of his father, who was very old, and carried him on his shoulders.
The son, because he is too young, and the father, because he is too old. But… what about the wife?
With the blindness caused by adrenaline, Aeneas went with the father on his shoulders, the child by the hand and, the rest, every man for himself.
Virgil says in his Aeneid:
Then my father, stretching his eyes through the shadows, “Flee”, he exclaims, “flee, my son! That way they approach; I already see the swords flashing”.
I do not know which adverse numen obfuscated my confused reason, leaving me senseless; for while I am running to and fro without a direction through lost places, either because the fates have snatched her from me, or because I have lost my way, or because I am exhausted, my Creusa, alas, my unhappy wife has remained behind us, and since then I have not seen her again; I did not even notice her loss or reflect on her until we arrived at the hill and the sacred temple of Ceres.
So with all the fuss he forgot his wife.
You or I might think that we would not forget our better half, but it is not for us to judge, even if it was an oversight that cost a life.
In the 21st century, it is also not for us to judge those who forget to cancel unwanted subscription renewals.
There are just too many: Netflix, Spotify, YouTube Premium, Amazon Music (just kidding), Amazon Prime, HBO, Disney Plus….
There are even mobile apps to keep track of it all.
In recent years everything works with subscriptions. There are a lot of people making a lot of money from this (no problem with people making money, of course).
Everybody knows that a more or less high percentage of renewals are unwanted, or by inertia, or I’m coming back in January, etc. Even so, I have never heard or read anyone reflect on the ethics of keeping a considerable percentage of subscriptions renewed unintentionally.
I decided to eliminate all types of autorenewing subscriptions from my course. I felt bad that there were people paying without coming in to take the classes.
So if you want to take the Latin from scratch course, you buy the course, in a single payment, and you have it forever.
This way no one forgets to cancel, because there is nothing to cancel.
So, one payment, yours forever.
Vale!
Paco
P. S. Later, the spirit of Creusa appears before Aeneas: that nothing is wrong, that he should go ahead, that he should not worry about her.