The Aeneid

By Virgil

★★★★☆

I’m going to try to keep this big picture and not get snagged on any of the many analytical and thematic points that came up in class - as interesting as they are - because that’s a whole different box of cookies.*

Self #1: “Repeat after me: This is a book review, not an essay.”

Self #2: “This is a book review, not an essay.”

Self #1: “Got it?”

Self #2: “Book review, not essay.”

Self #1: “Very good.”

Self #2: “Can I get back to the review now?”

Self #1: “By all means.”

I liked The Aeneid. It wasn’t exactly a pleasure read, but I liked it in the way you like arduous things (and by arduous I mean reading all 300+ pages of epic prose in 3 days) once they’re over. If you’ve ever read Grapes of Wrath maybe you know what I’m talking about. There were a lot of slow parts, many of which involved an excess of names, but there were also plenty of gripping parts that had me actually forgetting to watch the page numbers tick by as slowly as the minutes. For example, the last four books are almost entirely devoted to one long, drawn out, dramatic, and incredibly visceral battle scene. I may have cringed at least once a page, but I certainly wasn’t bored! 

Two Sentence Summary: After the sack of Troy, Aeneas escapes with a group of Trojan warriors and sets out for the shores of Italy, where he will found New Troy (aka Rome). He must first overcome the obstacles of a vindictive meddling goddess, and then conquer the land destined to become a great empire.

I’m guessing most of you have heard of The Aeneid. And maybe you’ve heard whisperings of comparisons to The Odyssey. Maybe some have you have even read it. If you a) haven’t and b) have read The Odyssey and didn’t loathe it, I recommend The Aeneid as a good companion read. It’s an excellent microcosmic example that for all the energy the Romans put into dissing the Greeks, they put at least as much or more into imitating (and in their minds, improving on) them. Naturally it’s chock full of meaty themes as well, like the conflict between duty and desire, the martyrdom of present happiness for future greatness, learning what to let go of and when, the ephemerality of human life and connection, the entanglement of place and identity... the list goes on. And Virgil wasn’t kidding around. He knew his way around a vivid description (see: incredibly visceral battle scene). I’ve never read such inventive – and numerous – descriptions of dawn. They put Homer’s lovely, if repetitive, “rosy-fingered dawn” to shame. And that’s pretty much Virgil’s goal in a nutshell**: outdo Homer. Whether he succeeds or not is up to you.

So what do you think? Did I keep the essay-writing impulse on a short enough leash? Are you thinking of giving The Aeneid a go? Or did I just resurrect old repressed memories of reading The Odyssey under duress in high school?

* I say box of cookies because I’ve never liked the creepy-crawly connotations of “can of worms.” It reminds me too much of sophomore biology and my lab partner who was determined to use night crawlers for the worm unit and then got scared of them when they reared their thick, slick, ugly pink heads and… oh. I’ve gone an opened another box of cookies, haven’t I?

** Other than, you know, establishing a mythic tradition for the founding of Rome that is. And getting paid handsomely by the emperor.


Books Read This Year: 5
Top 100 Progress: 38/100