This epic poem is a wonderful tool to think and feel with. It even has something of the uncanny about itThere was no thunderbolt of understanding; no flash of enlightenment. My first reading, as a teenager, brought me painfully through only a tiny fraction of it. Reading each line was messy and laborious, a dismemberment of language rather than a decipherment. But I cant think of another book that has invaded me more thoroughly.It is the Aeneid, an epic poem in 12 books that its author, Virgil, left unfinished at his death in 19BC. It is a story of identity and anxiety about nationhood. It presents invents the founding mythology of Rome, its ideological boundaries. In it, Aeneas, on the wrong side at the end of the Greeks siege of Troy, flees the city and sets sail with a raggle-taggle of survivors. He himself the son of a goddess, Venus is encouraged on his way by a series of divine portents. As he crosses the Mediterranean, he has adventures: he encounters the Cyclops, Scylla and Charybdis, in conscious echoes of Homers Odysseus. Most memorably, he falls in love with Dido, the Queen of Carthage, but abandons her when the gods remind him of his responsibilities to the future nation of Rome. Continue reading...
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