Excerpt:
Everything is from a different perspective, told from Trojan eyes, not Greek. Virgil’s writing is vivid and visual. There are some wonderfully creepy moments, such as when they sail off from the island of the Cyclops, and all the monsters come down to the shore, silently:
Down from the woods and the high hills they lumber in alarm,
the tribe of Cyclops, down to the harbor, crowding the shore,
the brotherhood of Etna! We see them standing there, powerless,
each with his one glaring eye, their heads towering up,
an horrendous muster looming into the vaulting sky
like mountain oaks or cypress heavy with cones
in Jupiter’s soaring woods or Diana’s sacred grove.
I can just see them, huge and terrifying, just out of reach. Poor Dido, too, caught in the torments of love, and dying for it. Her spells and her suicide are among the most vivid scenes...One of the things that caught me off guard — and my only excuse is that, honestly, I had no expectations of this piece going into it — was Aeneas’s voyage to the House of the Dead in Book 6. Several of my heroes this summer have gone down to the dead at one point or another (Orpheus and Odysseus are notable examples, as well as the Norse gods) and so this didn’t at first seem to be anything too out of the way. But then Aeneas begins looking around him. Here are the ghosts of infants. Here are those condemned to die on a false charge. The suicides. Those tormented by love (Dido is there, her wound still fresh.) Parricides, adulterers, regicides… wait. Of course...Dante chose Virgil to lead him through Hell in the Inferno because Virgil had already been there. This was an epiphany of epic (ha!) proportions for me,...
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