S. Eliot to Robert Frost. According to Theodore Ziolkowski,"Virgil has permeated modern culture and society in ways that would be unimaginable in the case of most other icons of Western civilization" (ix).
In the Aeneid, Virgil through out the story emphasizes through his characters that responsibility is of higher precedence than of love. He makes it apparent in Book II, in which Aeneas focuses on his responsibilities rather than on his wife as they fled the city and even in Book IV Aeneas suppresses his feelings of love for Dido and rather prefers his fulfilling his duty. While women in "The Aeneid" by Virgil hold love in a higher position than responsibilities. As in book II when Aeneas and his family are escaping from the city, Aeneas' wife Creusa vanishes but as Aeneas was so determined to fulfill his duties that he doesn't even notice when or how she vanished. "Never did I look back/or think to look for her," (p. 59) Aeneas said these words after...
Though his love for Creusa led him to go back and hunt for her but his duty had already reigned and thus when he found her she was a spirit. It is quite obvious that love and duty cannot fit into the same puzzle but a choice should be made between any one of them. And if one feels like Aeneas, the choice will become easier to choose. The characters portrayed by the story are unexciting and uninteresting and Aeneid by Virgil successfully depicts a feeling of grief and love. Though his love for Creusa led him to go back and hunt for her but his duty had already reigned and thus when he found her she was a spirit and even then Creusa's ghost told Aeneas that he is destined to have another wife.
Bibliography
Ziolkowski, Theodore. Virgil and the Moderns. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1993.
Anderson, William. The Art of the Aeneid. Englewood Cliffs: Prentice-Hall, 1969
