#41 - The Aeneid

It's been a while. I don't think I've ever felt so fatigued looking at the rest of this list, and yet I can almost physically taste the excitement I first felt when I made it and printed it out on hard copy to take around to trivia practices. I'm living in Toronto now with Amy, who has always been a part of this project, but it just gets harder and harder to justify sitting down and reading thick, heavy books that I don't always enjoy, let alone actually finding the time for them. However, this one is done, and after a couple of lighter non-list reads (Jane Jacobs' The Death and Life of American Cities), I'll keep on pushing with Homer's Odyssey.

The Iliad, the Odyssey and the Aeneid are all epic poems dealing with the Trojan War, a semi-fictional event that has been studied more than most real wars. The full cycle has a rich enough body of work that I'm surprised there hasn't been a more earnest effort to create a full television series tying them all together - starting from the beginning of the Trojan siege (Iliad) and moving through the war, fall of Troy and the journeys of Odysseus and Aeneid following the war. It could easily be a five-season story with 1/3 of the storylines dedicated to Trojan, Greek and Olympian plots...but that will be for someone else to write.

What was interesting about the Aeneid was that it was written by the Romans, which I had never had a real experience with. Most of my mythology was focused on the Greek side of things, and so seeing the revisionism in action was a very fascinating part of the reading. While the text still contained long speeches and dry lists of deaths (which would be much more fun in a television series), the action was lively and kept things moving, which improved on the epic poetry format. I'm optimistic that the Odyssey will keep this up. For what it's worth, I did enjoy the writing style of Homer more - or was it the Chapman translation that I appreciated? I guess we won't find out...until next time, on The Epic of Troy!

6/10