#aeneid

this is so sad alexa sing to me of arms and a man

mythologylesbian:

raffaelllllo:

thinking bout how vergil and tolkien both wrote a big epic story full of wars, battles, men having to obey orders given by destiny/greater powers, and in the end the things i (dare i say we? i dont know if that feeling is shared) remember the most are the feelings of going home, wanting peace, tears cried while fighting a senseless war because these heroes had no choice and were chosen by destiny, sacrifices made to rebuild a home, an intense longing for peace and quiet and love and home. big battles fought by heroes who are so deeply human. frodo cries. aeneas cries. both works give such a strong anti war vibe. im crying. i wish i could develop these thoughts better akkdkdjdjd

feel free to delete this comment if ur reblogging from me but i think this comes about as a result of both tolkien and vergil having lived through years of pointless, ceaseless warfare then trying to write an epic to give a mythologized history of their country/land/etc. its a very similar context for the two stories to have been written in. i also notice how tolkien’s published stories have the same arc as the aeneid with the “odyssey story” (the hobbit, aeneas’ wanderings) preceding the “iliad story” (lotr, italy). it’s all parallel!

Camilla in bk 11 of the Aeneid is just every woman ever who has had to take orders from a man with the iq of a salmon and it is actually excellent

the more I think about the Aeneid, the more I realise that when we look at it through modern eyes, it becomes a novel about so much more than the founding of a city. We follow characters who are truly traumatised by all that they have suffered, and a reluctant hero who craves his mother’s comfort - with the weight of his ancestors and his descendants on his shoulders. Despite his own personal trauma, Aeneas must carry on through all the suffering and loss, in order to fulfill his purpose. Despite loosing the most important person in her life, Dido must flee her own country and start up a new kingdom entirely alone, and of course be doomed to meet a tragic end, as all she has worked for falls apart. Despite having his future set out before him, Turnus must fight for all that he had previously deemed so certain, and eventually have it all taken from him, including his life. Surely as modern readers, these tales resonate with us in an entirely new and powerful manner - we can all relate to having to plough through trauma and tragedy despite our own emotions, to feeling alone, craving comfort, being thrown into uncertainty, loosing battles we thought we would win. And the beauty of the Aeneid is the sheer complexity of each one of the characters: hero through one eye, villain through another. It is more than a study of what it means to be roman, it is a study of what it means to be human.

Both the mortal and immortal women in the Aeneid are presented as fatally flawed in some regard. What with Dido’s furor, Juno’s pettiness and Camilla’s arrogance, all of Virgil’s women come across as tainted by the constrains and seemingly universal flaws of their sex. Based on this, it follows that Virgil himself was actually a mysoginist intent on ensuring that his audience understood that all women, even and especially those in positions of power, were inferior and incapable of fulfilling their duties and roles successfully. In this essay I will…

Augustus be writing the res gestae like: me meME it’s all about MEbitch

no bitch i created myself through propaganda

✨ virgil *looks at aeneas* he really do be pious tho

30iugeraandamule:

*guy whos only read the aeneid reading the iliad* getting a lot of aeneid vibes from this

this post killed homer

Please can all Dido/Aeneas shippers out there tag their posts with “imperialism” and “genocide” because not only is that an accurate description of this DISGUSTING relationship, it forces you to confront the reality of your ship which is built on the blood of the Punic Wars and the cultural and literal genocide of Roman expansion, and I want all of you to feel terrible about shipping this.

milesgloriosissimus:

HOW TO GET THE BOY YOU LIKE:

• Arrange a walk in the park with him and a bunch of your friends when you know it’s going to rain soon
• When it starts raining, split from the others with him and find a cave
• Let the thunder boom and nymphs howl
• Gods are witnesses enough
• Bam you’re married

Then recieve the worst “It’s not you, it’s my sacred destiny” speech of your life.

Make a bonfire of all his belongings as a way of letting go of the skuzzball, not as a funeral pyre.

Then Tiberinus, the region’s god, seemed to rise up before him
Out of idyllic waters edged by a border of leafy
Poplars, in person, quite elderly, shrouded in greyish, translucent
Flaxen attire, hair veiled by a shadowy mantle of sedge-grass.

Aeneid 8.31-5, trans. Frederick Ahl

hic Hecuba et natae nequiquam altaria circum
praecipites atra ceu tempestate columbae
condensae et divum amplexae simulcra sedebant.

Hecuba and her daughters settled by the shrines,
Like doves in a black storm, dropping sheer down,
They huddled close, clutching the statues of the gods.

Aen. II.516-517

So when the sky and grass met, rolling dumb for thunder
Saw I once a white dove, sole light of the earth

“Love In the Valley,” George Meredith