Hey, nobody likes all the epics. (Or is obliged to.) The Aeneid's high time of popularity were the centuries of the Middle Ages plus the early Renaissance, but it didn't really take a dive until the 18th century, not so much for content reasons but because there were far more people around able to read Latin (among the tiny population percentage which could read, that is) than there were people who could read Greek. You can tell, for example, that Dante was unfamiliar with the Odyssey and the Iliad and knew the characters only via their Aeneid versions. (Hence Odysseus/Ulisses being a boo, hiss kind of figure in the Divina Comedia.) Then with the 18th century the Latin reading declined while there were actual translations of the Iliad and the Odyssey into English and German and French etc, and suddenly everyone was "rediscovering" Homer and in then in the 19th century applying a distinctly romantic and nationalitic view, i.e. Homer is the real deal and the true voice of the people and Virgil is already decadent city dweller writing and so forth. Proving that the both of them, Homer and Virgil, are always regarded through contemporary views, and hey, same here.
(I like the Odyssey better than both the Iliad and the Aeneid, too, but I think the Aeneid has the more interesting-to-me-personally-descendants, so to speak: notably Watership Down, the rebooted Battlestar Galactica and Black Ships (which solves your female character problem by making the Sibyl who goes with Aeneas to the Underworld into a main and our pov character who is one of the Trojan women).
As for your other points: the Aeneid does have riddles - the advice Aenaes and his band of refugees get early on in Delos to seek out their "old mother" (when they ask where they should settle down) and which Aeneas' Dad Anchises interprets as meaning Crete as the home of the Great Mother Kybele turns out to mean Italy instead (I forgot how and why, it's been so many years...), and equally the prophecy that the exiled Trojans will eat their tables will turn out not to mean they're driven insane by starvation but that they will eat the hardcore Italian bread they put the other food onto first.
(There's also the metatextual riddle and eternal debate starting in the 20th century as to whether the whole thing is shameless Augustan propaganda or whether Virgil was really sneaky and subversive and worked in some critique, and whether or not the fact he never finished the epic and wanted it to be destroyed means he despaired of the subject or that he was just doing a Kafka (and being ignored, like Kafka.) Which brings me to....
Tidbits that don't glorify war: well, there's the much debated non-ending of Aenaeas, after defeating Turnus, going from his intention of sparing him to killing him after he has surrendered when he sees Turnus' wearing the armor of his dead friend. Now there's some obvious Iliad reminiscence of Achilles there (and if the first part of the Aeneid is Odyssey fanfiction, the second part is Iliad fanfiction, with poor Lavinia getting far less personality than Homer's Helen), though Achilles' going against the warrior code isn't that he doesn't spare Hector (nor does Hector ask him to) but how he treats his dead body. But it is still a distinctly non-heroic moment for the poem's central hero.
On the sympathetic side, there's also, contrasting with this, far earlier, Aeneas rescueing an old enemy, one of Odysseus' men whom Odysseus has left behind in the cave to be eaten by Polyphem (yep, Virgil really has it in for the guy from Ithaca), putting rescueing another human being over feuding.
And not about war, but subverting the poem's "founding the city that will lead to the founding of Rome has to come before hanging out with Queens located in Northern Africa, and of course none of us is thinking here of Cleopatra and Antony, dead only a measly twenty plus years" message re: Aeneas leaving Dido, there's the moment in the Underworld where he sees her, but she doesn't forgive him, instead, she ignores him. It's an interesting way of letting Dido have the last (unspoken) word, which given she stands in for two traditional Roman enemies - Carthage and Cleopatra in her capacity as a foreign queen temporarily distracting a proto--roman - definitely is not Augustan propaganda.
Re: female characters: Camilla the Amazon like Queen of the Volscans gets an entire book devoted to her. (Ursula LeGuin clearly suspects her of being Virgil's fave, since in her novel Lavinia she has Virgil lament he paid more attention to Camilla than to Lavinia.)
I entirely agree about the respective athletic games, and the way they say something about Odysseus and his hosts in the Odssey and come across as purely ornamental in the Aeneid. Boys and their sports?
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Date: 2025-05-15 08:49 am (UTC)(I like the Odyssey better than both the Iliad and the Aeneid, too, but I think the Aeneid has the more interesting-to-me-personally-descendants, so to speak: notably Watership Down, the rebooted Battlestar Galactica and Black Ships (which solves your female character problem by making the Sibyl who goes with Aeneas to the Underworld into a main and our pov character who is one of the Trojan women).
As for your other points: the Aeneid does have riddles - the advice Aenaes and his band of refugees get early on in Delos to seek out their "old mother" (when they ask where they should settle down) and which Aeneas' Dad Anchises interprets as meaning Crete as the home of the Great Mother Kybele turns out to mean Italy instead (I forgot how and why, it's been so many years...), and equally the prophecy that the exiled Trojans will eat their tables will turn out not to mean they're driven insane by starvation but that they will eat the hardcore Italian bread they put the other food onto first.
(There's also the metatextual riddle and eternal debate starting in the 20th century as to whether the whole thing is shameless Augustan propaganda or whether Virgil was really sneaky and subversive and worked in some critique, and whether or not the fact he never finished the epic and wanted it to be destroyed means he despaired of the subject or that he was just doing a Kafka (and being ignored, like Kafka.) Which brings me to....
Tidbits that don't glorify war: well, there's the much debated non-ending of Aenaeas, after defeating Turnus, going from his intention of sparing him to killing him after he has surrendered when he sees Turnus' wearing the armor of his dead friend. Now there's some obvious Iliad reminiscence of Achilles there (and if the first part of the Aeneid is Odyssey fanfiction, the second part is Iliad fanfiction, with poor Lavinia getting far less personality than Homer's Helen), though Achilles' going against the warrior code isn't that he doesn't spare Hector (nor does Hector ask him to) but how he treats his dead body. But it is still a distinctly non-heroic moment for the poem's central hero.
On the sympathetic side, there's also, contrasting with this, far earlier, Aeneas rescueing an old enemy, one of Odysseus' men whom Odysseus has left behind in the cave to be eaten by Polyphem (yep, Virgil really has it in for the guy from Ithaca), putting rescueing another human being over feuding.
And not about war, but subverting the poem's "founding the city that will lead to the founding of Rome has to come before hanging out with Queens located in Northern Africa, and of course none of us is thinking here of Cleopatra and Antony, dead only a measly twenty plus years" message re: Aeneas leaving Dido, there's the moment in the Underworld where he sees her, but she doesn't forgive him, instead, she ignores him. It's an interesting way of letting Dido have the last (unspoken) word, which given she stands in for two traditional Roman enemies - Carthage and Cleopatra in her capacity as a foreign queen temporarily distracting a proto--roman - definitely is not Augustan propaganda.
Re: female characters: Camilla the Amazon like Queen of the Volscans gets an entire book devoted to her. (Ursula LeGuin clearly suspects her of being Virgil's fave, since in her novel Lavinia she has Virgil lament he paid more attention to Camilla than to Lavinia.)
I entirely agree about the respective athletic games, and the way they say something about Odysseus and his hosts in the Odssey and come across as purely ornamental in the Aeneid. Boys and their sports?