Blog 4.3: Two pleads.

Aeneas's tale of his travels takes up Books II and III of the Aeneid. Aeneas begins by sighing deeply and telling Dido and her court that his is a long and tragic story, but that he is willing to try to recall it for his host. He starts by describing the fall of Troy. The Greeks, aided by the goddess Minerva, construct a huge wooden horse, within which they hide a great many armed soldiers. The rest of the Greeks flee the land. The Trojans rejoice, thinking that they have driven off their opponents. 

In Troy, Hector instructs his mother, Hekuba, about the rites to be held in Athena's temple, and then he goes to find Paris, who has been absent from the battlefield. He discovers his brother at home with Helen and her handmaidens, and he sternly rebukes him for his irresponsibility. Paris admits that he has been disgracing himself, and he prepares himself to join the fight. Hector, meanwhile, goes to visit his own wife and baby son.

He finds Andromache and the baby Astyanax on the walls overlooking the battlefield. Andromache pleads with Hector not to endanger him any longer. Achilles has killed her father and all her brothers, and now Hector is her whole family; she begs him to have pity on her and their infant child.

In the other hand, Anchises does not want to live to see the fall of Troy and asks to be left behind. Aeneas declares that he will never leave his father to die, and he steels himself for battle, but Creusa begs him to protect the house if he has any hope left for their survival.

Blog 4.1 : Sympathy, Yes or No ?

 Blog 4.1 : Sympathy, Yes or No ?

Among the adaptors of Greek culture, none was more brilliant, original, or influential than the poet Virgil. He faced a formidable challenge. Everyone who encountered Greek culture recognized how much it was shaped by Homer. To write a Roman equivalent to The Iliad and The Odyssey required an ability to think, a way with words, and a storytelling capacity that would enable a poet to do for Rome what Homer had done for Greece. Few poets before Virgil had attempted this task; none had succeeded in it.

                        Virgil’s claim is that even the Greeks, the victors, would be able to feel the sorrow of the event if it were told properly from the point of view of the victims. Virgil writes a characteristically evenhanded account, so that both losers and winners earn our sympathy and respect.

          At points during his story, Aeneas emphasizes the irrelevance of mortal concerns in the face of divine will. Venus’s persuasion of Aeneas to not kill Helen, for instance, relies on the ultimate inability of mortals to influence their destinies.

So for me, it earns sympathy.