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| Aeneas' Flight from Troy by Federico Barocci |
I love my Greco-Roman epics. So far I have read the Iliad and the Odyssey - both which I enjoyed greatly. Right now, I’m reading the Aeneid (translation by David West) - the journey of the pious Trojan named Aeneas whose destiny was to establish the foundations of the Roman Empire.
You can really tell that Virgil was trying to achieve the literary level that Homer accomplished. Right now, I’m only on Chapter 5 and so far you cannot help but feel sorry for Aeneas. His ordeals greatly mirror those of Odysseus, ironic considering Aeneas saw Odysseus as vile and ungodly. Perhaps Virgil did that to draw relations between the two characters. Then again, many quests that include finding some sort of Promised Land are bound to share similar themes.
One of the main distinctions between Aeneas and Odysseus is that where Odysseus was held against his will by a nymph that loved him, Aeneas genuinely did love Dido. Both characters have a Goddess guiding them through the different labors. To greater tie in his Aeneid to the Odyssey, Virgil made Aeneas face the challenges of the Scylla and the Charybdis, and the Cyclops that Odysseus blinded. These are some of the similarities between the two demigods that I have seen up until this point.
I will be updating this post as I am reading.
Update: Okay, so I have finished reading Chapter 6 and I just have to say that I am astounded by Virgil's belief in reincarnation. I would have never thought he was a proponent of soul transmigration.
Here is an excerpt from the chapter. The context here is Aeneas, having descended to Hades and reaching Elysium, asks his father Anchises about the crowd of people crowding around the Lethe river. The paragraph below is a tiny portion of Anchises' reply to his son.
Update: Okay, so I have finished reading Chapter 6 and I just have to say that I am astounded by Virgil's belief in reincarnation. I would have never thought he was a proponent of soul transmigration.
Here is an excerpt from the chapter. The context here is Aeneas, having descended to Hades and reaching Elysium, asks his father Anchises about the crowd of people crowding around the Lethe river. The paragraph below is a tiny portion of Anchises' reply to his son.
All these others whom you see, when they have rolled the wheel for a thousand years, are called out by God to come in great columns to the river of Lethe, so that they may duly go back and see the vault of Heaven again remembering nothing, and begin to be willing to return to bodies.
Anchises goes on to name famous Romans that will be born (or re-born in this case) as a result of Aeneas' fulfillment of his legacy.
