Who is the aeneid dedicated to

Aeneas celebrates the anniversary of his father's death by making sacrifices to the gods and holding athletic games. He maintains a deep respect for his father even after Anchises's death. When Aeneas visits the underworld, the pietas he has for Anchises is evident. He respects Aeneas's role as leader and makes every attempt to follow through with Aeneas's duties. The love that exists between fathers and sons, the ideal of pietas , is perhaps the most emotional bond portrayed in the Aeneid.

Virgil endows Aeneas with human qualities, portraying him a flawed mortal man. In Book I, he experiences overwhelming grief when he cannot find his wife Creusa during the fall of Troy and he feels discouragement when his fleet is struck by a storm. In Book II, Aeneas is uncertain about the course of action he should take.

Throughout the Aeneid , we see Aeneas as a sensitive, compassionate man. He is sympathetic and loving towards his people. Aeneas exhibits deep feelings for humanity.

Previous Book XII. Next Dido. Removing book from your Reading List will also remove any bookmarked pages associated with this title.

Are you sure you want to remove bookConfirmation and any corresponding bookmarks? My Preferences My Reading List. Of course, the reality is not quite so simple. First, since we are not sure that a person named Homer either wrote the poems or even actually existed, it is dangerous for us to assume that the same person was responsible for both poems, and given the history of oral composition that I described briefly in the last chapter, it is dangerous for us to assume that any single person wrote either of them.

Furthermore, The Odyssey is a continuation of The Iliad in only the loosest sense. Those adventures are exciting, but the heart of The Odyssey is elsewhere. Actually there were a number of other poems built around the Troy story, but except for brief fragments, those poems have disappeared. The Iliad opens by announcing as its subject the wrath of Achilleus and the destruction that resulted from that wrath.

What we see immediately is not the rigidity of Achilleus and his peers but the adaptability of Odysseus, the man of many ways. He may have had fantastic adventures, but what the narrator emphasizes is how much Odysseus learned from them. As we shall see, physical prowess is important in this poem, but it is far less important than mental ability. In addition, while The Iliad focuses on wrath, destruction, and death, The Odyssey focuses on a man, on his wife, on their son, and on life.

The Iliad is an epic because it focuses on a pivotal moment in the history of Troy, the moment leading up to its destruction. The Odyssey is a romance because it focuses on individuals and on fantastic adventures. The Odyssey then focuses on domesticity. He is just a man who wants to get home. He does not talk about how he is the best warrior, how he is superior to others. He does not boast, but his goal turns out to be harder to achieve than we might expect.

Achieving it requires Odysseus to learn about himself, about the many roles he like any other human being must play in life, and about his wife and child. In fact, this poem requires that wife, Penelope, and that child, Telemachos, to learn about themselves as well. In this sense, The Odyssey tells three separate stories, not one highly unified story as we see in The Iliad. If we look only at Odysseus, we miss far too much of the poem. Yes, our first view of the great hero shows him crying because he cannot get home.

The first four books of the poem, and large parts of later books, are devoted to Penelope and Telemachos and their fates. His wife Penelope, one of the most remarkable women in all of literature, has awaited his homecoming for two decades, during the latter of which she has had to fend off the attentions of the one hundred eight suitors who have moved into her house and consumed the treasures that Odysseus left behind.

Through a combination of wiles and intelligence and often those two are the same thing , she has managed to preserve her independence, though as The Odyssey progresses, it is clear that unless Odysseus returns soon, she is about to lose that independence.

Nonetheless, the emphasis on women is obvious, and these women make important points not only about themselves but about men as well. Circe, for instance, is famous for her ability to change men into pigs, but dare I say it?

Kalypso, on the other hand, is really taken with Odysseus and offers him immortality if he will stay on her island with her. She presents a major test for Odysseus, who indicates often in this poem that he is deeply concerned with the problems of human mortality; but Odysseus passes this test without a hint of hesitation. He wants only to be home with Penelope. He would rather be home with his by now middle aged wife than to live forever on a tropical island with a beautiful goddess, which is surely a sign of how much he loves that wife.

Athene, too, is a central figure in this poem. In fact, it would not be going too far to say that the poem is largely about the uses of intelligence, which invariably triumphs over the more common male attribute of prowess in fighting.

Time after time we see the superiority of wisdom over might. Might is a last resort, a lamentable last resort. Menelaos and Helen, whose passions stood at the center of the war, have become images of domesticity, preparing in Book IV for the wedding of their daughter to the son of Achilleus, though we may sense some troubles beneath the surface.

He cannot simply announce his return; he must prove himself to the woman who is so clearly his equal in intelligence. As we will see, Odysseus learns much about himself, largely through his encounters with women on his journey, but Penelope has also learned a great deal about herself during his absence. As the poem opens, Telemachos is about twenty years old. He has grown up in the shadow of a famous father whom he has never known, has watched as his mother has been besieged by the suitors, and has been helpless to prevent them from devouring his inheritance.

In The Odyssey we watch him turn from a boy into a man, as he begins to assert himself and then allies himself with his returned father. Family relationships are central to this poem. I for my part do not know. Nobody really knows his own father. This process, which we might think of as the process of becoming an adult, is not easy for the individual involved nor for those around the person. In order to define himself, Telemachos must go on his own journey, visiting Nestor and Menelaos, defying the suitors, and even establishing his power in relation to his mother.

Athene convinces him that his father will return, but she convinces him also that he cannot simply wait for that return. He must assert himself and take action on his own. As a result of this maturation, when Odysseus does return, Telemachos can relate to him not just as a son but as an independent person, which is an essential step in growing up.

If anything, it strengthens that attachment, because Telemachos is driven not only by what is expected of him as a son but by his own choice. One of the most touching moments in the poem—and there are many such moments, as Odysseus reveals himself to friends and family members—comes when Odysseus reveals himself to Telemachos. Of course, growing up is never easy, and Telemachos has much to learn. Early in the poem, as he begins to assert himself, he criticizes his mother and tells her, basically, to go back to her room and leave the business of the household to him I.

He is not exactly delicate with his mother, and modern readers might well find the way he talks to his mother offensive, so we must be aware of the sexism inherent in the culture we are observing. In order to assert himself in front of the suitors, Telemachos, who is reaching male adulthood, must establish himself as independent of and more powerful than his mother. In terms of his society, he is correct to say that the household power is his, which Penelope acknowledges by doing what he says, but which she also laments as she weeps for her missing husband.

The dynamics of this family are working themselves out in difficult circumstances, and it is vital, as we consider Odysseus, to keep in mind the stories of his wife and of his son. Perhaps we should approach Odysseus first as a son himself, a role that he plays on two particular occasions in the poem.

As a result of this speech, his father pours dust over his own head, a sign of mourning. At this point even Odysseus cannot continue the masquerade and he reveals himself, but we are left wondering why Odysseus would behave in such a way.

Why, seeing his father after twenty years, does he play a role, making up a new identity for himself? The answer is not that he is a cruel man who enjoys tormenting people. In fact, as we see throughout the poem, Odysseus enjoys inventing identities for himself. He tells stories to Eumaios, to Telemachos, to Penelope, to the Cyclopes—to almost everyone he meets. In other words, she knows that his deviousness and his deceptive tales, which are signs of his intelligence because he employs them so intelligently, are part of his nature.

At the same time, she is telling him that though he may be great at inventing identities, he is no match for her. Simultaneously, then, he is being both praised and put in his place. He can adopt any identity that he likes, says Athene, but she will always know who he is. We might legitimately wonder, however, whether he always really knows who he is, just as we may wonder whether we always really know who we are or whether, like Odysseus, we constantly go through a process of reinventing ourselves.

That question is raised not only by the many stories Odysseus tells and the many disguises he wears some of them the work of Athene but by the well-known adventures that he describes to the Phaiakians.

Perhaps his most famous adventure, his encounter with the Cyclopes, illustrates this point best. The Cyclopes are a savage group who have developed no societal structure. Furthermore, their possession of a single eye in the middle of their foreheads indicates a lack of depth perception, a deficiency that is both physical and intellectual.

This may seem to us like a fairly primitive trick, and we may laugh at Polyphemos for falling for it, but it has a deeper meaning for The Odyssey. The point that is made in this episode, and throughout much of the poem, is that identity, selfhood, can be dangerous. It must be understood and controlled. Consequently, Odysseus must even visit the Underworld, where he learns of his future—that his death will come from the sea—and where he meets his mother, who has died from grief during his absence, because he was such a good son and because she loved him so much.

His love for his mother, his identity as a good son, has killed her. In short, everything we do, the good and the bad, has unforeseen consequences. The poet always comments on the ironies of human existence. It should be obvious now that every part of the poem—every character, every episode—contributes to the overall effect of the poem. Nothing is extraneous and nothing is out of place, though we as readers must often exercise our own intelligence to see and understand the connections.

In this sense, this three thousand-year-old poem is interactive, as literature tends to be. It shows us the stories of Penelope, Telemachos, and Odysseus, but we as modern readers must put those stories together, see where they lead us. Usually a writer will help us in this task.

A writer may focus on particular words or images to stress a point, or a writer may repeat particular kinds of scenes with significant variations, as we saw in The Iliad. This story would have been known to the earliest audience of The Odyssey , but we may need to be reminded of it. Many, in fact, died before they could return home, and in the course of The Odyssey we hear about the fates of Nestor, Aias, Menelaos, and others. Some three centuries after The Odyssey was completed, the Greek playwright Aeschylus wrote a trilogy of play, The Oresteaid , based on this story.

Clearly this story stands in sharp contrast to most of The Odyssey. Agamemnon, as we saw in The Iliad is a man of force and brutality, but his physical power counts for little when he returns home. His return itself is without obstacles, and he learns nothing from his experiences, unlike Odysseus, whose return is difficult but provides him a vital education.

Of course, unlike Odysseus, Agamemnon came home with a captured woman, Kassandra, whom Klytaimestra also killed. Agamemnon really is not terribly bright. And Telemachos joins his father in combatting their enemies, while Orestes was forced to seek vengeance on his own. In fact, the two stories once again return us to the question of identity by focusing our attention on how these characters behave and why they do so. It is revealing that the ghost of Agamemnon tells Odysseus what he learned from his bloody homecoming, that women are untrustworthy.

Still the same old introspective Agamemnon that we saw in The Iliad. He contrasts sharply with Odysseus, who learns so much from his adventures, including that he absolutely must trust women. There is one other aspect of The Odyssey that should be covered in this brief introduction, the role of the bards. There are a number of reasons that a reader should pay close attention to these bards. One is that they give us an idea of how a Homeric poet might have operated.

After meals, the bards are brought in to recite in poetic form the exploits of some hero, providing what we would call after-dinner entertainment. It is especially interesting that Demodokos is blind, since Homer if such a person existed was reputed to be blind.

In fact, bards in oral cultures tend not to be blind, but literate cultures assume that only blind people would be able to memorize so much poetry. Aeneas shows this similar humanitarian compassion on another occasion, and in this case the individual was a Latin, just like Turnus.

When Lausus, son of Mezentius, dies at the hands of Aeneas, Virgil describes Aeneas as moved by "profound pity" when he beholds how young the boy was p. So given both this encounter and the one with the Danaan sailor, one can conclude that Aeneas has the capacity to show mercy to anyone, friend or foe alike.

It seems uncharacteristic, then, that Turnus did not benefit from this compassionate side of Aeneas. When Turnus beseeches him on his knees to grant his request for a proper burial, he requests that Aeneas remember the relationship he had with his own father Achises p.

Turnus merely asks that his body, dead or alive, be returned to his father after Aeneas is done with him. At this moment, it almost seems as if our hero will extend his greatest act of compassion yet to be seen in the epic so far by granting Turnus his life and letting him go home in peace p. In fact, one could argue that if Aeneas does grant Turnus his life, doing so would be a very wise political maneuver in attaining a valuable friend, or potential ally, in the region.

Which path does Aeneas choose to take concerning the fate of this great Latin prince? Alas, Aeneas chooses not to extend such a prudent, political gesture. This decision [to kill Turnus without even granting his request] was not a product of rational thought. At the sight of the swordbelt that once belonged to his dear Trojan brother, Aeneas "raged at the relic of his anguish" and blazed with a terrible anger p.

This flood of emotion and fraternal love for his fellow Trojan clearly overpowers his thought processes of deciding the right course of action to take concerning Turnus. If concept of duty is so important to Aeneas, could one logically conclude that he faltered in this moment of indecision and abrupt action? What happened to the benevolent, humanitarian Aeneas that saved the life of one enemy and honored the death of another? Both the Greek and Latin mentioned earlier who were recipients of his mercy must have killed Trojans in the past.

They were not any different than Turnus, since they too were enemies of the Trojan people. However, one can ponder if such drastic behavior really was uncharacteristic of Aeneas. For instance, in his affairs with Dido, it required the goading of the god Mercury to get him back on track to Italy p. Before that, it seemed as if he was quite content with his life in Carthage, overcome with love for Dido and the comfortable feeling of permanence and stability away from the tumultuous sea.

Although in the end, duty did prevail over passion, one cannot validly say that Aeneas came to such conclusions on his own. One does not need to read so far into the epic to see how Aeneas is so easily swayed by emotion. When Troy was burning to the ground, Aeneas, filled with shame and frantic rage, was prepared to die fighting, neglecting his future destiny as the progenitor of Rome.