Though he sometimes wavers, his overwhelming sense of duty (or guilt) will invariably pull him back to the Rome-focused task at hand. In contrast to the glory-hound Achilles, or the crafty Odysseus, Aeneas stands as a more dutiful figurehead swept up in fate. But, thankfully, Virgil is every bit the poet Homer was, and the poem’s success lies chiefly in how he overlays a familiar story with constant innovations. In lesser hands, yes, this story shouldn’t hold a candle to the older works. On the surface you might conclude the Virgil has simply taken Homer and rewritten him 800 odd years later for a contemporary Roman audience hungry to hear an illustrious origin story. Like Odysseus, Aeneas and his men are put through a sea of obstacles on their wayward journey home, and after a mid-point journey through the underworld, they are thrust into the kind of siege warfare that mimics the give and take plot dynamics that were a hallmark of the Iliad. Virgil’s efforts to tie Rome with Troy don’t end there: The Aeneid's plot swaps and smashes together the Odyssey and the Iliad into something more compact and consequently, a little more propulsive.

As a later stand-in for the ill-fated Trojan hero, Aeneas gets a much happier ending and through his eventual victory, Hector’s bloodline is permanently embedded in what was then the most powerful nation in history. As a primary figure, Virgil recasts the Iliad’s Hector in a new mold.

The basic storyline gives you everything you need in an epic poem, especially if you are coming in with a background knowledge of Homer’s classics. A fight for national destiny ensues, and Rome is given a birth that befits its self-identified greatness. Once they reach their sacred Latium, the Roman Goddess Juno incites a war between the incoming Trojans and the local chieftains led by the Achilles-esque Turnus. The poem follows Aeneas, one of the few survivors of Troy’s destruction, as he leads the last of his men through a series of trials as they make their way to Italian shores. With the Aeneid, the Roman poet Virgil provides his home country with a nationalistic origin grounded squarely in Homeric myth.

The aeneid book 1 pdf