The Aeneid

This is my first book read on kindle. Thanks to Project Gutenberg, all these classics can be downloaded for free.

While it claims the Iliad as prologue, the two books are very different in both narrative and tone. I was struck by just how viscerally intense the battle scenes were in the Iliad: the chaos of warriors fight over armor still strapped on a carcass in the middle of a battle, the "cloud of darkness" that descends over the eyes of those brought low by a spear. In contrast, I thought the battle scenes in Aeneid seemed somewhat... ritualistic. It simply did not had the same intensity.

The part I found very compelling is the narrative about Dido. Given the genocidal animosity between the two, Dido the Carthaginian queen received a very favorable treatment from Virgil. I actually found Dido the tragic heroine a more interesting character than Aeneas himself. The destruction of Carthage at the hand of the Romans centuries adds to the melancholy- it provides whatever the opposite of a backstory is called. On the other hand, I thought Virgil's other attempt to foreshadow his present via the famous underworld scene was a bit too over-the-top: not very subtle at all.

It was hard for me not to think about the historical context Virgil lived in while I was reading Aeneid. Was Aeneas' attempt to make peace between his Trojans and the Latians a metaphor?