jillian n.'s Reviews > The Aeneid

Once upon a 2050ish years ago, there was a Roman chap named Vergil who wrote poetry. And holy crappuccino, could he write poetry. Anyway, his chum Caesar Augustus says to him, "Verg, old pal, old bean! Write me some jolly old propaganda linking us Romans, inferiority complex-afflicted as we are, to the Greeks so we can get on with conquering the world and quit feeling so much like a master race of insecure teenagers, there's an absolutely spiffing chap. Oh, and feel free to completely copycat Homer as much as you like." So good old Virg does, of course, because he was cool like that. Eventually, he has 10,000 or so lines of beautiful (in all seriousness here, Vergil was a gifted poet, to the point of nearly making me enjoy some of this book and giving it a 2 star rating feels almost unforgivably shallow and harsh of me. No hard feelings, poor Vergil, my poor sweet Vergil), moderately hard to follow and unbelievably tedious dactylic hexameter filled with mind-bogglingly idiotic characters and Homer ripoffs. Unfortunately, because of poor old Verg's untimely demise (probably a fishsauce gone wrong, or a toothache maybe... a toothache caused by a fishsauce gone wrong isn't completely implausible and oh boy, what a way to go), it never gets properly finished. But before he pops off down the easy road to Avernus, he requests that the Aeneid, that shining highlight of his career, be destroyed. Augustus, however, either wasn't in a terribly compliant mood that day, or he was just really hurting from the lack of quality Homer fanfiction available at the time (this was in the dark days before fanfiction dot net and AO3, so the only real place for this kind of stuff was graffiti on a forum wall and there's only so much you can do with that). Whatever it was, he apparently didn't feel like honouring poor old Verg's dying wish.
I'm not going to say I wish he had just up and tossed it into Mt. Vesuvius or something else roughly that dramatic. That would be a horrid thing to say. Especially since this book contains such excellent quotes as
“If I cannot move heaven, I will raise hell”
and “...[the Cyclops] munched, the warm joints quivering 'twixt his teeth.”
Not to mention that this lovely piece of Homer fanfic & Roman propaganda is practically a pillar of Western literature and the glorious civilization of Academia, and the dons of Oxbridge will be howling for my blood. (Picture it—a few dozen old guys in big black robes chasing me off the intellectual lawns of the internet and calling for my death... what a mental image! It shall sustain me till 2022.)

But to be perfectly honest (and I'm not just saying this because I think it would be really cool and validating if I provoked the overlords of Academia to send a hitman after me), I wish he had tossed it into Mt. Vesuvius.