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.