Aeneas escaped the destruction of Troy with a few of his family (his wife died, and her ghost tells him to leave), carrying his aged father on his back. He escapes to Mt. Ida, where he builds something like a couple dozen ships from the sacred grove of one of the gods. (How the entourage of people to sail in these ships, including wives, escaped Troy is not explained.) After seven years of sailing around, Juno, who was still angry at Troy, tried to sink them in a storm, which blows them to Carthage. The Carthaginians are not known to be welcoming, so Venus, Aeneas’ mother, made the Queen of Carthage, Dido, fall in love with Aeneas.

Dido hosted a banquet for Aeneas and his men, and asked him to tell his story (just like the Phaeacians asked Odysseus to tell his story when he washed up on their shore), which he does for two chapters, describing in detail how Sinon convinced the Trojans to accept into their city the giant horse the Greeks left, the sack of Troy, and Aeneas’ escape. He also gave her treasures from Tyre, which he somehow saved while fleeing the city. Aeneas and Dido commenced a romance, but after a while of this, Zeus sends a messenger to Aeneas to remind him that his destiny is to settle on the Latian shore and found the great nation of Rome. So he ghosts Dido and sails off for Sicily in the night. Dido is both angry and inconsolable. She prays that the gods give him trouble all the way to his destiny, and then, tricking her attending maids, kills herself by throwing herself on a burning pyre. This is the reason why Carthage and Rome were enemies.

In Sicily, Aeneas held sporting games in honor of his recently deceased father, Anchises, in particular, a sailing race, which resulted in the damage to one of the boats. During the land festivities later, Juno riled up the women and they started burning the boats because they were tired of wandering and wanted to settle down. Since half the ships were burned, Aeneas said that those who were tired of wandering would stay there, and the rest would go fulfill their (his) destiny. Juno caused the lead pilot to fall asleep at his watch at night near a treacherous shore, but Poseidon preserved them until dawn, when Aeneas took the tiller. So they arrived safely on the Latian shore.

The King Latinus had received instructions from his father in a dream to marry his daughter Lavinia to a foreigner, which would better their line. Aeneas, a hero from Troy, clearly fit the the instruction, so he gave Aeneas permission to build a city on his land, and offered Lavinia to Aeneas. Queen Amata, however, wanted the suitor Turnus, from a neighboring city-state to marry her, and between her and the Fury that Juno sent to stir up trouble, resulted in Turnus persuading all the peoples nearby to fight Aeneas for Lavinia’s hand. King Latinus opposes this, but did not make any attempt to stop it. Aeneas did not want war, the the Fury also maneuvered Aeneas’ son Ascanius into killing a sacred dear.

After getting upset that King Latinus broke his promise, Aeneas sailed away with his son and a number of men to seek help from a friendly king nearby. Meanwhile, Venus asked Vulcan, her husband, to make a Aeneas a shield. The shield, like the shield Vulcan made for Achilles, was richly carved, but unlike that one, is invulnerable, and is also decorated with prophetic scenes from the future of Rome, which was descended from Aeneas.

Back at Latium, Nisus and Euryalus made a nighttime raid from the proto-city which Aeneas had constructed. Their elders tred to warn them, but in their youthful zeal they went anyway. Like Diomedes and Odysseus’ raid in the Iliad, they killed a number of sleeping Italians, but unlike the other raid, they were discovered, cornered, and killed. The next day Turnus and his army briefly breached the city. Then Aeneas returned and there is a great battle scene, where deaths are described in Homeric gory detail. In one of the fights, Turnus killed Pallas, the son of King Evander who provided men to help Aeneas, and for whom Aeneas felt responsible.

Aeneas still wanted a peaceful resolution, and offered single combat between him and Turnus to resolve the conflict, which was accepted. However, the next day it was clear that Aeneas was by far the better fighter, and Juno caused the truce to be broken, so we get another battle scene. Aeneas, feeling betrayed by Turnus, searched for him all over the battle field. He was wounded in the leg and had to be taken out of the fight, but his mother Venus healed him. Eventually he found Turnus and chased him down, wounding him. Turnus begged for his life, and Aeneas was about to agree, and then he remembered how he had mercilessly killed Pallas, and ends the poem by angrily stabbing Turnus to death. (Prior to that day Aeneas had talked to his son, explaining that although it was Aeneas’ fate to marry Lavinia, it was his son who would found line that would become the Roman rulers.)

I read the Dryden translation, from 1697, which is couplets and reads rather like Shakespeare. The translation options were not great, and Dreyden’s is both poetic and faithful to the Latin. It flows well, although the pronunciation of some words clearly has changed (notably, “wind” [air blowing] rhymed with “bind”, “war” rhymed with “far” and other "-ar” words, “blood”, “flood”, and “wood” all rhymed). However, the rhyming, and the phrasing structure necessary for that feels like it obscures whatever the flavor of the original Latin might be. The translation is clearly a great work, as well as the Latin source, but it would have been nice to have an option like Lattimore for Homer, which is poetic but lets the original shine through.

I found the Aeneid, as literature, to be technically well done, but without soul. Virgil does a great job of copying Homer, and manages to combine both the Odyssey (books 1 - 6) and the Iliad (books 7 - 12), keeping the style and form of each. The Odyssey part highlights a woman, includes a narration of story and travel, and there are athletic games. The Iliad part jumps from the overall battle to individual two-person fights, with a little substory of the fight and the gory results, including the soul leaving. He also has some great metaphors from the natural world, like in the Iliad. As a Latin version of Homeric style, Virgil succeeded magnificently.

However, there is no dramatic tension at all. Iliad has you at the edge of your seat wondering how the characters will respond to the situation, even though everyone knows how it ends (I took the wise advice of reading the graphic novel version first), and the poem repeatedly tells you what will happen. Homer repeatedly says that Hector will die, yet you cannot see it happening, until Achilles returns to the fight. But when he does, he goes on such a wild rampage, chasing a desperate Hector fleeing around the city like a fox vainly trying to outrun the hounds, that you actually identify with Hector, even though you also sympathize with Achilles for grieving and avenging his friend (which he was duty-bound to do in an honor culture). Then when aged Priam humiliates himself and asks for the body of his son in the middle of the night, Achilles sees from Priam’s perspective, agrees to return the body, regrets the destruction war causes, and is reconciled with Priam, yet he also instructs his servants to cover the body, lest he see it and return to anger. Virgil has but occasional echoes of these dramatic tensions, and only in the battle vignettes. Aeneas is the perfect example of piety: obedient to the gods, even when it means leaving his love Dido, dutiful to his father, and peace-loving. He dutifully serves the state of Rome in his role as its founder single-mindedly. Only in the last lines of the poem does anything like tension break out.

The Aeneid feels like an Evangelical movie in its lack of soul. The purpose of an Evangelical movie is to get people to give their lives to Jesus, not to tell a good story; naturally, this results in a soulless story. Story as means to an end is just propaganda, which may be the Aeneid’s problem: Emperor Augustus told Virgil, who was known as an excellent poet, to write it. Virgil did not like Augustus, and seems to have worked on it as slowly as possible, sometimes only one verse a day. His will requested that it be burned. Presumably part of Augustus’ goal was to construct legitimacy for himself by connecting himself into the Roman story. Probably he wanted something that would highlight traditional Roman virtues of piety and serving the state, which Aeneas models. I am told that Romans universally, not just Augustus, felt that it captured the national spirit. It may be that, since educated Romans all knew the Greek Iliad and Odyssey, Augustus wanted to replace them with a Roman version (certainly it became the main text in Roman education). None of that involves anything like Homer’s celebration of the ancient Greek value of immortal-glory (achieved through pushing yourself in battle) and at the same time a stinging critique (Achilles is the best fighter, yet his offended sense of honor results in the death of many Greeks, including his dearest friend), with the ending scene between Priam and Achilles a poignant depiction of the devastation that immortal-glory produces.

The comparison to an Evangelical movie is apt in another sense, namely humanity’s relationship to the gods, compared to Homer. In the Aeneid, people receive instruction from the gods, whether in a dream or through omens, and they obey them. In Homer, the gods almost never communicate directly; they act by deflecting an arrow to protect the people they love, or they impersonate another person (such as how Athena gets Odysseus’ son Telemachus going). Except in rare occasions, the humans do not know what the gods’ will is, which is shown in how they communicate, where the assumption is that if they win, then Athena, or Ares, or Zeus was helping them, but before the battle it was more like “we will return if Zeus wills, otherwise we will not”. With Virgil, the will of the gods is clear to Aeneas. This is similar to how Evangelical / fundamentalists relate to God: God’s will can be known clearly, we have determined what it is, and therefore all that is left is obedience. Evangelicals also rarely produce literature and art, because literature and art are irrelevant when obedience is what is important.

This makes me wonder how much the Roman and Greek cultural values led to the difference between Western Christianity and Eastern (Greek-speaking) Christianity. When the Empire split in 395, Christianity seems to have begun developing along different lines. The eastern Patristric writers were very philosophical, while people like Augustine, who did not read Greek, took a more juridical view of salvation. Western Christianity was very much concerned with obedience, guilt, and assurance of salvation, while Eastern Orthodoxy saw the problem as being disconnected from Life itself, so the Church became the ark of salvation, which leads us in the path of union with Christ, who is Life. From an outside perspective, Orthodoxy seems primarily concerned with spiritual disciplines, while Western Christianity is primarily concerned with obedience to God. Perhaps Virgil is a hint that Roman and Greek cultural values have a longer shadow that we think.

Virgil and Homer’s depiction of women is also quite different. In the Iliad, women have no agency, and women from defeated cities are basically sex-slaves to people like Achilles. The domestic women of Troy also have no influence, although they are obviously treated much better. Even Hector’s wife is unsuccessful at persuading him to stay away from the battle, although she at least gets to try. In the Odyssey, the Phaeacian girl that Odysseus meets advises him that the Queen is the decision maker, but we do not actually see her making any decision. The most agency Penelope has is promising to marry someone when she finishes her weaving and then undoing it every day; there is no option to not marry. Goddesses have agency—Athena and Hera do things, and Circe and Calypso keep Odysseus as a “kept man”, as it were—but not human women. I am given to understand that this also reflects women’s lack of agency in Greek society. Roman women had more agency, although the male head of the family still had absolute authority, and this is reflected in Virgil. Queen Dido is not married, her husband having recently died. Unlike Penelope, she can be Queen by herself. Although, one could argue that this is because making Carthage an enemy of Rome via jilted love requires this, other women also influence events. The women in Aeneas’ party burn the ships when they get sick of wandering. Lavinia’s mother is influential in opposing her husband to giving Lavina to Aeneas. However, at least in Virgil, women are always emotional and manipulative. You would not really want to have Dido or Queen Amata as a wife. Hector’s wife, however, seems really loving, and Helen clearly regretted eloping with Paris in the Iliad, while in the Odyssey she seems more like having been overcome with a Venus-state and now she is happy back at Menelaus’ side, and even gives puts a drug in the men’s wine so that they can enjoy the evening without the pain and sadness of the war.

It baffles me that the Aeneid had so much influence. Apparently people would use it similar to how Christians desperate to know God’s will sometimes open a Bible randomly in Bible-divination: people would open Virgil randomly for guidance. Dante made Virgil his guide in the Divine Comedy. Now, Dante was Italian, so he had less cultural distance from Roman culture than I do, having been influenced by the British cultural Celtic-Anglo-Saxon mix. Piety and service to the state were not strong values in either culture. And Americans are so individualistic and distrusting of authority that Aeneas does not resonate. Perhaps my personal focus on Celtic and Anglo-Saxon literature, rather than continental literature, is why I am unfamiliar with any references to Virgil, apart from a cousin of my father, who is named after the poet. In fact, I only read the Aeneid because Dante was a big fan, and the Divine Comedy is next on my list. I somehow saw the Aeneid as dull, an impression which is largely confirmed.