To his sad soul a grateful off'ring go!'T is Pallas, Pallas gives this deadly blow."He rais'd his arm aloft, and, at the word,Deep in his bosom drove the shining sword.The streaming blood distain'd his arms around,And the disdainful soul came rushing thro' the wound.”(Please note that the latter quote is from a different translation of the Aeneid by John Dryden.)In a manner of speaking, the Aeneid is sandwiched between elements taken directly from Homer; thus it is inviting us to consider Virgil's poetry in light of Homer's. The Aeneid is both praise to the Homer’s style—if indeed imitation is the most sincere form of flattery. By imitating it Virgil attempts to further develop the style. This directly correlates with the Roman desire to imitate the Greeks in terms of art and religion. As mentioned before, Virgil does not have the Iliad's irony. Of course, the Aeneid is not truly a tragedy. The man Aeneas is destined to succeed and found Rome and the structure is unconventional in that Aeneas is not the absolute dominant in the story. From the very beginning of the poem, when Aeneas flees Troy, thus tying back to Homer and the Greeks, his character seems somewhat displaced. He does not have the driving desire Odysseus possessed since it was not by his choice he moved away from his home city. Because of this, he finds many homes along the way until he is compelled by his fate to move on. It is ironic that Aeneas, who has no ambition, has a destiny to become great while Odysseus does not.There are also many similarities between the three works. With the exception of the Iliad, the Odyssey and the Aeneid both describe the trials of a heroic figure who is the ideal representative of a particular culture and time period. Yet, Achilles/ Odysseus and Aeneas are unlike one another. This is understandable once it is understood that the two authors lived in very different worlds, whose values and perceptions varied greatly of a ...
