Essays on The Aeneid

Throughout Ancient Greek literature, characters often act in extremes. Heroes find motivation through rage and act with blind, fiery emotion to win their battles; seers and leaders achieve success after reasoning through complex puzzles and problems. Both are usually praised and rewarded for such qualities, but in The Aeneid and The Bacchae, Virgil and Euripides, respectively, present alternative stories. They demonstrate the other side of lives lived with passionate recklessness or stubborn ...

In Virgil’s Aeneid, we follow the journey that Aeneas makes from Troy to found Rome. Along the way, he comes to Carthage, which is a rapidly developing city that serves as a model for what Aeneas wants when he comes to founding his own city. At the head of Carthage is Dido, a beautiful young woman who has captured the attention of large throngs of young men. By looking at the sequence of events that follows the meeting between Aeneas and dido, we can determine what our overall opinions are of ...

Although Influenced by different times, different cultures, and different writers, The Odyssey and the Aeneid, which have their differences, still coincide and relate beyond the influence of the surroundings. Virgil, the author of the Aeneid, undoubtedly influenced by Homer's, the author of the Odyssey, works and Virgil seems to draw themes and events into his story throughout his epic. The cultures around the two authors, although extremely different, had underlying themes that helped in the ...

Reading these texts: The Aeneid and Phaedo, consecutively, one comes across a surprising amount of similarities; though the texts are vastly different in tone and ideology, both authors have some sense that the concept of “rebirth” is a present force in the universe. The theme of rebirth, or life after death is the single things that brings all humans who have lived together a common plight: “What happens after death?” Though Virgil and Plato would not agree on the majority of the other’s ...

To get to talk about the underworld we need to understand where it comes from and what exactly this place is. The underworld is associated with the idea of hell. In the myths of some ancient civilizations, the hell was the mysterious and much grim kingdom of the dead. Although commonly thought as the black secret land associated with caves and holes in the world, hell was not always a place of punishment and misery. Afterthought systems presented the idea of the afterlife in which the evil ...