The Aeneid (19 BC) by Virgil

Aeneas Flees Burning Troy by Federico Barocci (1598)

The more I read ancient, epic poetry, the more I suspect that it's really just not for me.

As a Roman civ fanboy, I should have had a far greater interest in this than I did Homer's original poems. I found The Iliad to be beautifully written, but overly long and more than a bit repetitive. The Odyssey I liked quite a bit more. The Aeneid feels like more of the same, but of lesser quality.

It is, after all, propagandist fan-fiction of the highest caliber. Perhaps it's not the point, but I found little to hook me in the narrative and continued reading this with more of a rote feeling than an active engagement with it. Virgil was blatant in his intent to write this for a contemporary, Roman audience, so a lot of that blood-red chest-thumping is going to be lost on those of us reading it in the modern day. Was I supposed to feel some desire for the Trojans to found their new home? If so, I never did. So their serpentine journey through the Mediterranean felt more like just going through the motions to me rather than the winding adventure it was perhaps meant to be. Was I supposed to root for Aeneas? I never felt much sympathy for him, so his trials were rendered less entertaining than maybe they should have been.

I did find it interesting that the actual Trojan horse and sack of troy come from The Aeneid's second chapter rather than Homer's original poems. I noted their absence during my prior reads of The Iliad and The Odyssey. And there are portions of the story which are quite compelling; Aeneas coming across Dido in the underworld and the entire episode of Aeneas exploring the underworld with the Sibyl surely had to be an inspiration for Dante's later work Inferno. The Ahl translation that I read was superb, and my edition featured many illuminating endnotes which regularly described Virgil's brilliance in the construction of his Latin to feature multiple meanings, nearly by the page. Such is lost in the English translation, sadly, but it did allow me to appreciate why this was considered such a great work for so long by Latin readers over the past couple of millennia.

But there's just a bit too much of retreading Homer's steps going on. The most interesting portion of the story, to me, was trying to gain a grasp of whether or not Virgil was attempting to glorify the contemporary Augustan regime, and to what extent. It made for an interesting layer. But on its own, the story let me down. Maybe I should have waited a few more years between reading Homer and tackling The Aeneid.

I once read someone call a book "more enjoyable to appreciate than to read", and I'm feeling that with The Aeneid like I did with The Iliad. They were constructed as poetry, and I can't shake the suspicion that there's something lost in translation, because they just don't read the same prosaically. They're very repetitive, very indulgent, but not so much fun to read.

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Meditations (167) by Marcus Aurelius

Perhaps the stoic philosophy Marcus Aurelius' ruminates upon within this diary can most adequately be summarized as "going with the flow", and thinking a lot about said 'flow' while you're at it.

It's always been amusing to me just how comparable our American society is within that of ancient Rome, despite being separated by the Atlantic ocean, language, religion, and two millennia. Meditations would suggest that the upper crust of Rome during the Pax Romana shared a similar malaise and an ennui to that depicted in an American film penned by a Sofia Coppola, or a Japanese novel by Haruki Murakami, for example. A good part of Meditations is focused on the same questions developed countries have been asking themselves for literal ages: "How do you live a fulfilling life when you are no longer struggling to survive each day?" In this, Meditations is still highly applicable to daily life in developed countries.

Much of Marcus Aurelius' philosophy is anchored in reason and discipline, something I find personally appealing. When tasked with a great question about the human condition (eg. "where does the soul go when we die?") he's often given to tracing a thread back down from the abstract, monumental cloud that is the question back to the earth of reason and attempting to answer it as simple and straightforward manner as possible. I find this appeal to cold logic and tranquility quite comforting; it tends to take the teeth out of the questions that worry us so—it's like being terrified of the monster in the dark, only to switch on the light and realize it was just your hat and jacket on the coat rack. Through this stoic calm he seems to realize the core idea of this entire book: Any worries we have exist only in our mind, thus mastery over our own mind leads to the mastery of any worries we might have. It's a simple way of facing down adversity and making it seem less daunting, and it's probably what has made this book so timeless.

This is one of those books that changes when you read it at different times of your life. Its density allows for this. When I read it in University, most of its appeal was the novelty of reading an Emperor's inner thoughts. Now that I'm midway through my third decade, however, I find its call to self-discipline most appealing.

I'm sure I'll read it again, and I'll probably pick up something new to be enthralled about when I do.

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