Reviews

The Aeneid by Virgil

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13delathauwere's review against another edition

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adventurous emotional informative tense medium-paced

Plot- or character-driven? Character
Strong character development? It's complicated
Loveable characters? No
Diverse cast of characters? It's complicated

4.0

nawa's review

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2.0

read this for school so it was a struggle to get through >< my two stars are for dido and book four alone

"Once more Dido tried to raise her heavy eyes, but failed. The wound hissed round the sword beneath her breast. Three times she raised herself on her elbow. Three times she fell back on the bed. With wavering eyes she looked for light in the heights of heaven and groaned when she found it." HHHDNHHDJD!!!!!!!!

shadybanana's review

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4.0

I got this book from an old bookshop because it was purple and i thought it was kind of related to the Iliad and the Odyssey. I knew Virgil was like a Roman counterpart to homeboy Homer.
Then for more than a year, the book in its purple grace, sat on various shelves in my room as I decided if I even wanted to read it. There was something about the reedy texture of the pages and about Aeneas (something to do with surviving the sack of Troy, and being like this literal nepo baby of the olympians), that discouraged me.
And yet I overcame my Roman xenophobia and started reading it.
To start off, it didn't feel as epic. Maybe Virgil is just no Homer. Or maybe after decades of reading thousands of reiterations of the sack of Troy and the Greek contingent and its heroes, its hard to root for their sworn enemies. Except Hector. Hector was a good boy.
The most fascinating aspect of this book to me was how it complemented many tidbits that I had gathered of mythology and stories around that time from podcasts, or other books. Reading about Dido made me realise that this arc from Aeneid translated to the many wars that Carthage fought with the Roman empire in the real world and gave birth to Hannibal. The description of Aeneid's shield and the prophetic visions in it, and the others throughout his quest for a land: delineating the spread of a great empire and of a lineage of emperors that the world would know for a very long. The mention of Alba Longa, the Caesars and the many Roman wars, made this book more than just a mythology book to me. It also made me think about Virgil and I imagined him sitting and narrating this story sometime while the Roman empire was at its zenith. I wondered for the thousandth time while reading mythology how such stories travel and are recreated and retold and saved for the present age. I read 'Remus' By T.P Wiseman last year, and it was a really in depth book about the origin of the Roman empire as we know it today. But maybe in too depth. However I understood some aspects of it better retrospectively after reading the Aeneid. The evidence of Lupercalia and Evander, mention of the Palatine and Aventine hills as well as the varying accounts of stories of the same events among the Greek and Roman mythologies.
I think its kind of funny that today we know the Roman empire to be one of the greatest empire and yet it is the Greek mythology that seems to be more mainstream? It took me a while to figure out that Juno was Hera and Saturn was Cronus. I just think its really interesting how the same power figures have such different representations across different mythologies especially when it comes to Aphrodite and Venus.
I liked the ending at the end. Kind of neat. It felt like a tidy tying up by the storyteller. Virgil found the best way to explain the latin language and the democratic nature of the Roman empire without lessening the greatness of Aeneas and his merry band of warriors and their founding of another Troy in italy. Oops spoiler alert? Not really. The tiny bit where the King Latinus sends envoys to Diomedes felt like a nice throwback, and him saying: "Bro we messed up trying to sack Troy and all of us paid the price for it (cc: Odyssey), please just accept him as king." was...nice. Logical.
A couple other points.
The color purple is associated with royalty, and I cant imagine that notion being built anywhere else but in ancient Rome where the darker shade of it was only reserved for royalty. Which also probably started after some oracle told Aeneas to do sacrificial rituals for Olympians at coasts in specific purple garbs.
Every time I read about Turnus, I imagined Mars from Dota 2.

Best consequence of this book? I am motivated to play Hades again.