An Odyssey: A Father, a Son, and an Epic

by Daniel Mendelsohn

The Aeneid revisits the world of Homer’s poems but radically shifts their point of view to that of the losers: it retails the adventures of Aeneas, one of the few Trojans to survive the Greek obliteration of Troy. After escaping the burning wreckage of his city with (this is one of the epic’s most famous and touching details) his father strapped to his back and his young son in tow, Aeneas first undergoes a series of elaborate wanderings (meanderings that remind us of the Odyssey) before he settles in Italy, the land that has been promised to him as the homeland of the new state that he will found, where he must then fight a series of grim battles against the locals (warfare that reminds us of the Iliad) in order to establish himself and his people forever. While he lacks the cruel glamour of the Iliad’s Achilles or the seductive slyness of Odysseus, Aeneas does embody a dogged sense of filial obligation, a quality much prized in Roman culture and signaled by the Latin adjective most often used of Virgil’s hero: pius, which means not “pious,” as might seem natural to an English-speaker’s eye, but “dutiful.” The proem of the Aeneid is seven lines long; the first of these, in which the poet announces that he will sing of “wars and a man,” arma virumque, is itself a nod to both the Iliad, which is above all about “wars” or “arms,” arma, and to the Odyssey, whose own first line, as we know, announces that it is about “a man.”