REPOST: The Aenied by Virgil

Virgil's Aeneid, inspired by Homer and inspiration for Dante and Milton, is an immortal poem at the heart of Western life and culture. Virgil took as his hero Aeneas, legendary survivor of the fall of Troy and father of the Roman race, and in telling a story of dispossession and defeat, love and war, he portrayed human life in all its nobility and suffering.

So What's the Story?: After Troy is destroyed, the Trojan people are lead to another land by Aeneas, who is destined to reach Italy and found Rome. However Juno fights this destiny every step of the way, determined to if not prevent Aeneas' destiny, then to make him wish he had stayed to die in Troy.

Reaction Shot: I hate this poem.

Don't give me that look. I'm studying this at A-level, so I've looked at it in enough depth to be allowed a few moments of irrational hatred. If you're giving me the look because of anything that runs along the lines of "...Poem?" then yes, the Aenied is an epic poem, written by Virgil and shamelessly ripping off Homer's epic poems The Oddysey and The Iliad. In that order. Unfortunately, looking at the Amazon reviews has made me realise I'm apparantly in the minority among sensible adults, so I turn instead to my book journal, where my vitriol will make me feel better.

Please bear in mind, that I don't actually have my copy of the book on me, so I'm using notes that all seem to have "BITCH CAN'T WRITE" scrawled across the top. Hopefully, this won't affect the accuracy of this too much.

The translation, I've been reliably informed, is one of the better ones. The poem doesn't rely on phrases such as "white armed Hera" to fill out the meter, which is one of the few matters on which I'm willing to give Virgil a little credit - Homer, bless him, actually paid enough attention to the meter he was using to do that. Most of the wandering the narrative does is actually part of the genre, so I can't criticise it too much, even though I wouldn't mind it. Most of my complaints though are actually very lengthy, so I'm going to cut it here, with the warning that if you actually liked the Aenied, Virgil's treatment of Dido, don't want spoilers for it, or don't like extensive comparisons of Virgil to an annoying, Mary Sue writing fanboy of Homer's, you might want to ignore this post.



5. He's a sellout. You think I'm joking? The Aenied was propaganda commissioned by the Emperor Augustus, and it serves to give his background - and his adopted father, Julius Caeser - a little touch of divinity. And believe me, Virgil lays it on with a bloody spade. In one book of the Aenied, Aeneas goes down into the underworld - regretably, only visiting his father as oppsed to actually staying there. While he's there, his father shows him a pagent of heroes - all Aeneas' decendants, who will rule Rome and the Roman empire after him. The description of Augustus and a little later his nephew (who apparantly died when he was in his twenties, which induces much wailing and nashing of teeth from Aeneas' father) are longer than the descriptions of about three quarters of the other kings and emperors, and it's so full of bootlicking -

When I say someone lays it on with a spade, guys, I am not exaggerating.

4. He's a plagiarist. Well, perhaps that's a little unfair. He merely pays homage to Homer, using his work to create a roman epic that was intended to rival both of Homer's. The fact that Virgil lifts situations, people, scenes, and hell the whole damn format of his poem

(The first six books detail Aeneas' wanderings, related back to a charming audience, and various scenes throughout, are from The Odyssey, right down the the telling the story in flashback. Hell, Virgil even goes to far as to add in a Greek on the Cyclop's island so that he can use the damn story of the Cyclops from the Odyssey. *FLAILS* The last six books, which I'm pretending don't exist at this point before I lose the will to bloody live, detailing the battle between Turnus' and Aeneas' - who are compared by most scholars to Hector and Achilles respectively although if Aeneas had a "best friend" who was secretly his wife *coughpatrocluscough* then damn I missed it. - armies are based on The Iliad.)

from Homer don't change the fact that it's merely homage! Yes, even though he's stolen scenes from it.

3. He's a badfic writer. ... I swear, he's like the worst kind of fanfic writer in the world. He takes all his situations from other, better writers - well, I know there's another writer the Aenied was based on, but as I can't remember his name I can't actually look him up and decide whether he is a better writer. Pretend that he is for the sake of the argument - and sticks a bloody Mary Sue in there to make the whole mess so much better. His mother's a goddess (Venus), people fall over themselves to either help him or kill him, he walks out of situations that would have - and usually did - kill anyone else, he's an excellent fighter, he's well known for his piety, his archnemesis is a goddess (Juno), and somehow, even though he was never mentioned in the Iliad, everyone in the world knows who he is! ghsn;dhjfdh.

And he presumably got paid for it, which makes me flail harder. GODDAMMIT WHY CAN'T I GET PAID TO WRITE THE ILIAD FANFIC!

2. Book Four. For those of you fortunate enough not to know about Book Four, it's the book in the Aenied that centres on Dido. She's the queen of Carthage (Did I mention that Aeneas is not only king of his people and has a SUPER IMPORTANT DESTINY, he also had a thing with the queen of Carthage?), and when she's first described, she's beautiful, brave (she escaped her brother Pygmalion, who killed her husband - the one she swore she would never betray, even after his death), cunning (She won the land to build her city on through trickery - she was told she could have all the land she could cover with one ox-skin, and managed to get enough land by cutting the hide into strip and using it to surround the land she wanted.) and spends her days helping her people to build their city. She is described as "Like the goddess Diana."

... And then Aeneas comes along, and with his SUPER MARY SUE POWERS, along with a little help from his mother, the goddess of love who decides that "welcoming" is not a good enough attitude and decides that "madly in love" is better, he succeeds where hundreds of other suitors have failed and is "married" to Dido in a supernatural wedding ceremony organised and presided over by Juno.

Everything is wonderful for Aeneas after this, until the gods send a message to him telling him to return to his journey, whereupon he becomes the biggest dick to ever mess over a woman (He tells his men to get the boats ready, and not to let Dido know, he'll find a way to break it to her gently; he then gets found out because the entire city heard the rumours before Dido did. Dido points out that he married her and promised to love her; Aeneas denies doing any such thing.) and Dido becomes a ravening harpy who ends up killing herself because she can't live without him.

Yes, it was during this book that BITCH CAN'T WRITE started appearing on my notes. However did you guess.

Basically my problems with this book are:

If they had any variation of the "Show, don't tell" rule in ancient Rome, Vigil never heard it. We are told Aeneas and Dido are madly in love - or at least that she is; how Aeneas feels is never mentioned until he's leaving and he claims to be feeling pain about it - but we never actually see it. We never see them interacting. Book One, she speaks to his men, not him, until finally she asks him to tell her about his wanderings which leads to a two-book monologue; book four she speaks about him to her sister, but we don't see her speaking to him until they're breaking up. They go straight from meeting to the wedding to the break-up, and we see them talking to each other exactly once. Jesus. Certainly Dido's ravening harpy stage is never accounted for.

Virgil couldn't characterise a decent woman if her characterisation came up and bit his balls off. Dido starts off perfect and ends up insane and dead with no real explanation in between. Lavinia is a sheep. The closest he gets is Camilla, and she's introduced and killed off almost immediately - and believe me, the build up and destruction of her reminds me of comic writers who get featured on "Girls Read Comics" who go "Look! Strong woman! I can write a strong woman! Call off the fangirls - oops, too late she's dead." Bastard.

If Virgil wanted to write a romance, then he should have done the goddamn work for it. If he wanted Dido to fall in love with Aeneas, then he should have shown them interacting, should have been willing to actually put a little effort into making it believable instead of having Venus go "O HAY LETS MAKE HER FALL 4 MY SON, LOLZ," after Jupiter assured her that Aeneas would be happy in Italy. If he couldn't be bothered or didn't have the space for that, then he shouldn't have put it in.

... Look, I have to study this with a teacher who thought Aeneas was the greatest guy she'd ever read about, even in book four, and won't hear a word said against him. This has been building for months.

If you really want to know why I can't stand Virgil and Aeneas, book four is the only one you really need to read. It's annoying, it destroys the characterisation he's already set up, it makes Aeneas look like a bitchy Mary Sue, it reduces Dido from a strong, competent woman to one who stabs herself and throws herself onto a fire because she's being left by a man who refuses to even he admits he loves her on the page. It's my example of how not to write a romance, and definitely how not to write one that's you want to end badly and have the man come out looking anywhere near good.

I just. ARGH. It's terrible and horrible and I hate it with the fire of a thousand suns.¹

1. DEAR VIRGIL: YOU'RE DOING IT WRONG.

Okay. I'm calm now. I think that's enough bile and victriol to keep me smiling and sunny about anything else I read for months. So long as I don't think about, y'know, actually having an exam on this, I'll be fine.

The Verdict: Credit where it's due. Virgil did try to have it burned. I only wish he'd succeeded.

¹: I apologise for the rant on romance - for some people it's Stephanie Meyer's Twilight, for me it's Virgil's book four of the Aenied.

Edit: Fun fact! This rant is almost two thousand words long, and that's more than I've written for anything else since the start of December last year. Jesus Bloody Christ.