I am going to go out on a limb here and say that for me, Virgil's The Aeneid reads like Homer-lite.Īlthough Virgil has extraordinary verve, drama, and emotive skills, he borrows so heavily from Homer's Odyssey, I felt that I was reading a plagiarized rip off. It's still an enjoyable Classic, but more of a faked and forced mythology than a natural one.įagles translation of Virgil is beautiful, fluid and eminently readable. It's much more contrived than the traditional epics credited to Homer. And if you know that going in, you can see it. It was written by Virgil for the Roman Emperor as a deliberate way give Rome a place in mythic history. The great strengths and fatal flaws of the characters and even the gods are still archetypical and relatable to people today, even with thousands of years of "wine dark sea" between our cultures. These are about as Classic and Classical Lit gets and I would recommend them to any reader. And I was always a mythology fan as a kid, so that helped too. While the poety format and traditional oral devices make them harder to read for some, they made it easier for me. The Iliad and Odyssey are great and I found that the lyrical style was something I actually enjoyed. In that process, I finally got to all three of these: the Iliad, Odyssey, and the Aeneid (mostly while afloat in the Navy with no where else to go). So after I graduated, I went back and read the ones I'd always really wanted to read. I'm a slow reader and just didn't feel I had the time. I was one of those English majors who never really read the books in school they were supposed to. ![]() Fragments of Homer account for nearly half of all identifiable Greek literary papyrus finds. Homer's works, which are about fifty percent speeches, provided models in persuasive speaking and writing that were emulated throughout the ancient and medieval Greek worlds. ![]() The formative influence of the Homeric epics in shaping Greek culture was widely recognized, and Homer was described as the teacher of Greece. Most modern researchers place Homer in the 7th or 8th centuries BCE. Herodotus estimates that Homer lived 400 years before his own time, which would place him at around 850 BCE, while other ancient sources claim that he lived much nearer to the supposed time of the Trojan War, in the early 12th century BCE. These epics lie at the beginning of the Western canon of literature, and have had an enormous influence on the history of literature. In the Western classical tradition, Homer (Greek: Ὅμηρος) is considered the author of The Iliad and The Odyssey, and is revered as the greatest of ancient Greek epic poets.
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