The Aeneid: Books 7-9
Mar. 23rd, 2013 06:55 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
cahnMy Aeneid post, finally! Many many apologies for the delay.
I forgot to mention on my last post that the Sibyl gets an awesome snarky line:
"Anchises' son, the road down to Avernus
Is easy. Black Dis' door gapes night and day.
The work, the effort, is to walk back up
Into the open air."
Book 7: Aeneas lands in Italy. At first everything seems to be going pretty well, he hits it off with old Latinus (his eventual father-in-law, I think), but then, okay, I guess Juno heard me complaining about how she was utterly useless as a villain, because she suddenly gets way more effective in this one. She enlists "hell-winged Allecto" (which I think is a great soubriquet) to do all the things that I feel like any self-respecting goddess-villain ought to have been doing to start with: Allecto goes and whips up people's natural fears and hatreds to a level where it starts leading to war. It's actually a neat trick, for a villain. Finally!
(Oh, darn it all, I should have requested Allecto for rarewomen. It didn't even occur to me! I suppose because I think of Allecto as more of a force of nature than female, but she does count.)
Anyway, Latinus wants Aeneas to marry his daughter, whom Turnus thought he was going to marry, and that coupled with Aeneas' guys killing someone's pet stag leads to everyone fighting everyone else. King Latinus, showing his fine moral courage in the face of opposition, gets this speech:
"But I've earned rest, I'm on the haven's edge,
And robbed of nothing but a happy death."
He kept indoors and dropped the reins of state.
Seriously, Latinus? Your answer is to abdicate and go inside? I'm way more annoyed at you than I am at Turnus.
Book 8: Yeah, so, I had been impressed by how much less gory the Aeneid was than the Illiad, but I guess Virgil decided that he might as well emulate the Illiad in order to impress all the Illiad-lovers. So anyway, there's war between Aeneas and the Italians, thanks to hell-winged Allecto. (I'm sorry, I just like saying that.) Lots of people die, many in gory ways. We're supposed to be emotionally involved in these deaths, only I'm sort of not, I guess. Just in case you hadn't guessed that he was Making a Parallel with the Illiad, there's an extended scene where Venus gets Vulcan to make Aeneas a shield. "Just like you made Thetis' boy Achilles a shield," Venus says helpfully, in case we didn't get the allusion. Vulcan puts all the stories of glorious Rome on it, and somewhat hilariously Aeneas likes it but has no idea what these people are doing on his shield.
I very much like the last line:
He shouldered his descendants' glorious fate.
Book 9: More gore. Everyone gets kind of tired of fighting and dying, including me; and there's some posturing. That's... pretty much it. Turnus kills a bunch of people, but in the end doesn't die himself, although since he is apparently the Big Human Bad he is probably doomed to die in the next couple of books or so.
I forgot to mention on my last post that the Sibyl gets an awesome snarky line:
"Anchises' son, the road down to Avernus
Is easy. Black Dis' door gapes night and day.
The work, the effort, is to walk back up
Into the open air."
Book 7: Aeneas lands in Italy. At first everything seems to be going pretty well, he hits it off with old Latinus (his eventual father-in-law, I think), but then, okay, I guess Juno heard me complaining about how she was utterly useless as a villain, because she suddenly gets way more effective in this one. She enlists "hell-winged Allecto" (which I think is a great soubriquet) to do all the things that I feel like any self-respecting goddess-villain ought to have been doing to start with: Allecto goes and whips up people's natural fears and hatreds to a level where it starts leading to war. It's actually a neat trick, for a villain. Finally!
(Oh, darn it all, I should have requested Allecto for rarewomen. It didn't even occur to me! I suppose because I think of Allecto as more of a force of nature than female, but she does count.)
Anyway, Latinus wants Aeneas to marry his daughter, whom Turnus thought he was going to marry, and that coupled with Aeneas' guys killing someone's pet stag leads to everyone fighting everyone else. King Latinus, showing his fine moral courage in the face of opposition, gets this speech:
"But I've earned rest, I'm on the haven's edge,
And robbed of nothing but a happy death."
He kept indoors and dropped the reins of state.
Seriously, Latinus? Your answer is to abdicate and go inside? I'm way more annoyed at you than I am at Turnus.
Book 8: Yeah, so, I had been impressed by how much less gory the Aeneid was than the Illiad, but I guess Virgil decided that he might as well emulate the Illiad in order to impress all the Illiad-lovers. So anyway, there's war between Aeneas and the Italians, thanks to hell-winged Allecto. (I'm sorry, I just like saying that.) Lots of people die, many in gory ways. We're supposed to be emotionally involved in these deaths, only I'm sort of not, I guess. Just in case you hadn't guessed that he was Making a Parallel with the Illiad, there's an extended scene where Venus gets Vulcan to make Aeneas a shield. "Just like you made Thetis' boy Achilles a shield," Venus says helpfully, in case we didn't get the allusion. Vulcan puts all the stories of glorious Rome on it, and somewhat hilariously Aeneas likes it but has no idea what these people are doing on his shield.
I very much like the last line:
He shouldered his descendants' glorious fate.
Book 9: More gore. Everyone gets kind of tired of fighting and dying, including me; and there's some posturing. That's... pretty much it. Turnus kills a bunch of people, but in the end doesn't die himself, although since he is apparently the Big Human Bad he is probably doomed to die in the next couple of books or so.
